LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
Shelf ,Mj5 



♦ 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



REASONABLE CHRIST 



31 Series of ^tuDtes 



By GEORGE E. MERRILL 



Immanuel, which is, being interpreted, God with us. —Isaiah and Matthew 
God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. — Paul 





277 roy 



SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY 
New York . . . BOSTON . . . Chicago 



1893 



^ 



.AS 



Copyright, 1893, 
By Silver, Buedett and Company. 



The L 

OF 



WASHINGTON 



Hnttiersttg ^rcss : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



PEE FACE 



ONLY one desire has found expression in the prepa- 
ration of this book, — to present the Christ of the 
Gospels as One who satisfies the reason as well as the 
heart of Believers. The book presupposes faith, and sets 
for itself only the humble task of aiding faith to grow 
by fixing the attention upon the content of the Gospel 
as reasonable, upon the person of Jesus as satisfying the 
conditions which called for His life and work upon earth. 
Our argument is from facts. It begins with the expe- 
rience of mankind in sin ; it ends with Christianity estab- 
lished in the world ; and prior experience and present 
fact find their satisfaction and explanation in the Christ 
of the New Testament. If any reader should find that 
positions are sometimes quietly assumed, which have 
been the ground of learned and bitter controversy, and 
perhaps in time long past have been either apparently 
refuted or formally condemned, the writer would only 
say that he has tried not to be swayed by any consid- 
erations apart from what seems to be the plain story of 
the New Testament and its own appeal to the mind. 
He has not turned aside to consider whether the views 
advanced are new or old, or whether they have been 
approved or condemned in the history of the Church and 



■i PREFACE. 

its doctrine. In general the pages have not been bur- 
dened, nor the attention diverted, by references upon 
such matters ; and it may be added that merely tech- 
nical discussion and the use of terms which might be 
desired by the professional theologian have been avoided 
as much as possible, that the general reader might be 
the more easily approached. 

Jesus becomes most lovely to him who understands 
Him best. The more the mind dwells upon His match- 
less Presence, the more does the heart respond to the 
love that suffered for the world. These studies are laid 
at the feet of the disciples of Jesus, in the hope that 
they may help some to understand Him better, and in 
the remembrance that He said that our service to each 
other is the best that we can render to Him. 

G. E. M. 

Newton, Massachusetts. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. "That Holy Thing" 9 

II. The Luminous Boyhood 29 

III. The Baptism of Kighteousness 42 

IV. The Nazarene Family 54 

V. The Triple Temptation 68 

VI. Life among Men 75 

VII. Questions of the Time ......... 87 

VIII. Doctrine 109 

IX. Christ in Miracle 124 

X. Solitude and Prayer 140 

XL The Man of Sorrows 155 

XII. Calvary 168 

XIII. The Kisen Lord 186 

XIV. Christ in His Church 198 



Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone embrace, 

Believing where we cannot prove ! 

Thon seemest human and divine, 
The highest, holiest manhood, thou ; 
Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 

Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

Our little systems have their day ; 

They have their day and cease to be ; 

They are but broken lights of thee, 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

We have but faith: we cannot know, 
For knowledge is of things we see ; 
And yet we trust it comes from thee, 

A beam in darkness : let it grow. 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell ; 
That mind and soul, according well, 

May make one music as before, 

But vaster. 



Tennyson. 



THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 



Without controversy great is the mystery of godliness; He who 
"was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, 
preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up in 
glory. Saint Paul. 

If reason is not of itself capable of finding the highest truth, but, 
on the contrary, is in need of a revelation, still, reason must be able to 
understand the revealed truth, at least so far as to recognize in it the 
satisfying and convincing conclusion of those upward-soaring trains of 
thought which reason itself began, led by its own needs, but was not 
able to bring to an end. Hermann Lotze. 

I report as a man may of God's work, — all 's love, yet all 's law. 

Robert Browning. 



"THAT HOLY THING." 

TT is significant in the story of the Gospels, that the 
angel who announced to Mary of Nazareth that she 
had been chosen to be the mother of the Son of God, 
said : " That Holy Thing that shall be born of thee shall 
be called the Son of God." 1 The word was not " babe/' 
or "child," or "man," but "thing." 

The choice of this word was only natural after the 
other wondrous announcement : " The Holy Ghost shall 
come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall 
overshadow thee." It was to be no eommon conception 
that Mary was to experience. The child was not to be 
the carpenter's son. He was to be reared in the carpen- 
ter's home, and Joseph was to be His reputed father ; and 
long afterwards people would say of Him, when He had 
been doing mightier works than the most skilled crafts- 
man could ever do, " Is not this the carpenter's son ? " 2 
But He Himself would always know that carpentry was 
not "His Father's business;" 3 and from the first His 
mother knew it. She was and remained a virgin, accord- 
ing to the story, until after " that Holy Thing " was born 
of her. Afterwards she was wife to Joseph, that patient 
and kind man, who at first was minded to be just and 

i Luke i. 35. 2 Matt. xiii. 55. 8 Luke ii. 49. 



10 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

yet merciful with the maiden of his love, and so to " put 
her away privily," and bring no scandal upon her. But 
as he was better taught, he took her and kept her for 
his own, and she bore him other children. 2 There is no 
adequate reason for supposing that Mary remained a 
virgin, and that they who are called the brothers of the 
Lord were only His cousins. But whether there were 
other children in the Nazarene family or not, the rec- 
ord concerning Jesus is not altered ; the declaration is 
that Jesus Christ was born of human maid from concep- 
tion produced by God's Spirit ; that He was therefore Son 
of God and Son of Man, — not man alone like all other 
men, nor God alone as God is God, but a Personality 
entirely unique. The angels' word, therefore, may be 
supposed to have been spoken with care. We are face to 
face with the teaching of the Incarnation. Is this miracle 
credible ? Is it in accord with reason ? If it is, the 
whole wonderful life portrayed in the gospel is open to 
our faith. 

A popular writer describes a certain German professor 
in a work of fiction as one who "had his theories of 
God." All men, soon or late, come to have their theories 
of God. We believe that there is a knowledge of God 
that is not the product of reason. Eevelations direct to 
the soul, innate and instinctive assurances of God, may 
be assumed, we believe, with safety ; but beyond all 
these the reason is impelled to a belief in God. The 
demonstration of God is impossible ; but the assumption 

1 This is believed to be the only natural interpretation of the narrative. 
The view that Christ's "brethren" were children of Joseph by a former 
marriage, or children of Clopas and Mary, and so His cousins, will be 
^referred to hereafter. 



"THAT HOLY THING." 11 

of God is necessary. We hold it to be thoroughly scien- 
tific to give faith to Him even as the Unknowable, and 
to follow the life that is in Him, though He be " past 
finding out." 

That the processes employed for the attainment of 
belief by science and religion are similar, is evident. 
The student of nature notes phenomena that send him 
back to beginnings beyond his ken, for which he must 
assume a cause. The chemist, for example, assumes the 
existence of atoms. To take the latest definition which 
is within reach of all (Century Dictionary), "the atomic 
theory in chemistry is the hypothesis that all chemical 
combinations take place between the ultimate particles, 
or atoms, of bodies, and that these unite either atom with 
atom, or in proportions expressed by some simple mul- 
tiple of the number of atoms. Modern atomism is, 
primarily at least, merely a physical theory of the inner 
structure of matter, constructed for the convenience of 
physical research." Now so far from any positive know- 
ledge of atoms being claimed, the very contrary theory of 
the absolute homogeneity and continuity of bodies has 
been held. Sir William Hamilton declares that strictly 
speaking "atomism is inconceivable, for this supposes 
atoms, minima, extended but indivisible." In other 
words, so far from atomism being known as a fact, there 
are objections even to its conception. And yet modern 
chemistry assumes atomism, and finds the theory satis- 
factory in actual work. Phenomena are explained by it, 
and induction confirms faith. 

In like manner the physicist relies on an hypothetical 
medium of great elasticity and extreme tenuity pervad- 



12 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

ing all space, not excepting the interior of so-called solid 
bodies. He thus explains light, heat, and electricity. The 
assumption of the existence of an ether is a good " working 
hypothesis." Until the untruth of such hypotheses is 
proved, they are accepted as true ; they are not demon- 
strated, but they are probable from induction ; they are 
therefore the credenda of science, and heresy must either 
prove another faith, or be crucified. 

Now the process of religious reasoning is the same. 
Prof. J. P. Cooke of Harvard University in the Ely Lect- 
ures of 1887, repeated before the Lowell Institute in 
Boston in the same year, said : " The knowledge of God 
has come to man through nature precisely in the same 
way as the generalizations of science, and is subject to 
the same limitations and carries the same conviction as 
all general truths. Man knows God by the same means 
and through the same sources that he knows the prin- 
ciples of gravitation, heat, and electricity. In each case 
an assumed energy acting through special channels under 
definite laws is the best explanation he can form of a 
certain class of phenomena." Under the general title 
" The Credentials of Science the Warrant of Faith," the 
lecturer proceeded to establish the truth, that the funda- 
mental postulates of theology rest upon the same basis 
as the teachings of science. It is to be admitted at once, 
that "God is past finding out." He is to be assumed. 
He is the Intelligent First Cause. Phenomena find their 
only adequate explanation in the hypothesis of God. 
"No man hath seen God at any time;" but all induc- 
tion leads to Him. If we believe in God we are able to 
explain natural, including spiritual, phenomena, at least 



"THAT HOLY THING." 13 

to some extent. Without Him, the universe, and most 
of all man, remain a mystery. Anselm's dictum, " Crede 
ut intelligas" is therefore scientific. Faith is scientific, 
and atheism falls entirely out of the line of scientific 
thought. 

We decline, therefore, to have any argument with 
atheism. It is not necessary to prove God. The task 
is impossible, and equally undesirable. Were He brought 
to demonstration, there were loss of ideality. Not even 
Christianity, reverently defining God as Trinity, dares to 
reduce Him to rules of the triangle. That God is, and 
that He is the rewarder of all those who diligently seek 
Him, making such revelation of Himself as His own per- 
fection and our frailty need, is all that even this best 
religion claims. 

But if this be granted as the basis of faith, what 
follows ? Only that what God is and what He does 
shall be harmonious. We find the phenomena of nature 
attaining their ultimate explanation in Him. Natural 
law, or orderly sequence, we refer to Him at the last. 
The question, therefore, whether any apparent exception 
of usually observed sequence in phenomena is possible 
or likely, is reduced to a consideration of what God 
would be likely to do in given circumstances, impossible 
perhaps to foresee, but easy of apprehension after God 
has acted. The mere question of miracle as resting 
upon the credibility or number of witnesses to the alleged 
fact, is of less importance than the antecedent probabil- 
ities found in appropriate conditions for that fact, or than 
acknowledged facts which may be traced back to the 
alleged fact as an adequate cause. Deduction may prop- 



14 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

erly follow induction. Scientific investigations proceed 
upon this principle. A progression is observed in the 
history of man. By and by a human skull of pecu- 
liar shape is found in a cave, with a few rudely carved 
implements. The presumption is irresistible, that the 
implements were made by the man whose skull is the 
sole evidence that that man ever existed. The case is not 
one of demonstration. There are wide possibilities that 
the tools might have been made by another, perhaps even 
by some one of the human family long antedating this 
poor remnant of a human frame. No one saw this man ; 
no one saw him carve these tools. The known rudeness 
of the world at that time and the propinquity of these 
remains are the only testimony ; but the reason is satis- 
fied with the probabilities. Without multiplicity of 
witnesses the conditions of the case are eloquent. 

Not to delay longer, * the conditions of miracle as 
consequent upon a belief in God, are these: — 

1. The fact of sin in man. 2 

2. The probability that God as God, having the 
attributes usually assigned to Him by human thought, 

1 The credibility and number of the witnesses of the miracles of the 
Gospels can hardly be impeached with success, though the attempt is old. 
We believe their testimony to be ample and sufficient. 

2 Even if the Biblical doctrine of the Fall be denied, as we think it 
never rightly can be, the argument of the following pages does not fail. 
If there was never an abasement of the race, it is beyond cavil that there 
is much baseness in the race ; and this baseness is sufficient to admit the 
opportunity for the introduction of a great moral force to limit and finally 
destroy it. The theory of evolution permits the introduction of conditions 
which may hasten improvement, the creation of environment in which the 
process of elevation shall be promoted. But a proper understanding of 
Genesis will leave little space for conflict upon this point. 



"THAT HOLY THING." 15 

a God of power, justice, love, will undertake to negative 
sin, destroy its power and effects, and save man. 

3. The fitness, the appropriateness of such a revela- 
tion of God for this purpose, as shall be an addition to 
man's previous knowledge of God ; some change in the 
conditions of human life, by which the conditions in 
which sin had resulted should be counteracted, if not 
contradicted. It might not have been possible of predic- 
tion, that such change, however appropriate and desir- 
able, would occur. But having occurre'd, the fitness may 
be recognized that a force should be introduced, or if 
existing previously should be revealed and set in action, 
to more than restore equilibrium to moral conditions in 
a world in which the balance had been in favor of wrong. 
It would be fit to more than restore equilibrium, since 
equilibrium would only leave the morally depraved in his 
sin and not lift him out of it. In some way there must 
be moral levitation, which must overcome the power of 
moral gravitation, and actually draw man upward out of 
the abyss in which he is found. More exactly, since 
levitation is only the action of gravitation itself, by 
which the lighter body rises as the heavier falls and 
occupies the space beneath it, what if the very laws of 
righteousness themselves, under which the sinner has 
remained in sin hitherto, shall effect his moral eleva- 
tion by the introduction or revelation of a hitherto 
unknown agent? Just as the heavy silk, or other 
material, out of which a balloon is made, must fall to 
the earth from whatever height set free, but will be 
quickly lifted from the earth by the same law of gravi- 
tation which previously acted, if spread out to inclose a 



16 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

gas lighter than air, so it would seem God's moral laws 
might have some provision for lifting those who are in 
sin, from the depths of their abasement to the lofty 
height of His own moral perfection. A revelation of 
such a power might negative all previous human exper- 
ience, and yet be so far from an infraction of divine law 
as to be wholly necessary to its fulfilment. It might 
have been ordained " from the foundation of the world." 

The historic Christ, suddenly appearing among men, 
attested by many, actually produced and produces such 
moral results. If only one man had been lifted into 
righteousness as the result of Christ's work, the conclu- 
sion that a new force had been revealed would be 
irresistible. Of this Christ certain things are affirmed. 
Concerning these affirmations we are not interested to 
know whether they are in the line of former experience 
or not. In the circumstances of this case it is more likely 
that they will be extraordinary and counter to the line 
of former experience. The problem is that man shall 
be brought out of the power of sin and made righteous. 
The fact is, that the problem has been solved, and man 
has been thus saved from sin by an experience new and 
extraordinary. Former experience was uniform, and 
uniformly powerless to bring man to God. To effect 
the new fact, a new experience, so far from being un- 
likely, is to be expected. Christ, so appearing, with such 
claims, accomplishes the work, sets in train the moral 
renovation of the race. It is affirmed of Him that never 
man was like Him. This is consistent with the condi- 
tions and with the results. It is therefore credible. He 
is shown as coming in the most extraordinary way, with 



"THAT HOLY THING." 17 

a change in all that we have known of the generation of 
human life, begotten of God, born of a virgin, because 
this would make Him a being wholly adapted to the 
work to be done, — a work hereafter to be defined in His 
own words and wrought out through all His life. It is 
a miracle, a wonder, according to the speech of men ; it is 
only a " sign" according to the speech of God. By one act 
Omnipotent Love brings God and sinful humanity together. 
A sudden flash of angelic vision reveals a baby born in 
Bethlehem of Judaea. His parents are too reverent to 
name the child. An ancient prophet of their people had 
called Him Immanuel, or " God with us." Long after- 
ward His Apostle would say of Him : " God was in Christ, 
reconciling the world unto Himself." Therefore He was 
named from heaven Jesus, for He was to save His people 
from their sins. It is Incarnation of Deity. Incarna- 
tion is shown as the baby grows to boyhood, and passes 
on to man's estate and to life's end. " That Holy Thing " 
which was begotten of the Holy Ghost and born of Mary, 
Son of God and Son of Man, is always the same consis- 
tent Being, doing His one work of bringing God and man 
together, through Himself reconciling the world to God. 
It is this purpose that makes the Incarnation reasonable. 
Jesus Himself thus stated His mission : " The Son of 
Man is come to save that which was lost;" 1 "I am 
come in my Father's name ; " 2 "I am not come of my- 
self, but He that sent Me is true, whom ye know not. 
He hath sent Me." 3 "I am the Light of the World;"* 
"I am come that they might have life, and that they 

1 Matt, xviii. 11. 3 John vii. 28. 

2 John v. 43. 4 John viii. 12. 



18 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

might have it more abundantly ; " 2 "I am come not to 
call the righteous, but sinners to repentance ; " 2 "I am 
come not to judge the world, but to save the world ; " 3 
" To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into 
the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth ; " 4 
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only 
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should 
not perish, but have everlasting life." 5 Such sayings of 
Jesus might be multiplied many times, showing the 
nature of His mission, the one purpose of God, to save 
the world from its sin through the clear revelation to it 
of God. That which the blinded race had always been 
groping after, the God that had become " unknown " to 
men, was to be brought nigh. The avenging deity pla- 
eated only by men's unworthy offerings, pacified or 
bought off or cheated by their inventions, was not the 
God of heaven. The true God must reveal Himself to 
men, — a God hating sin, indeed, but loving the sinner, 
and so hating and loving that He Himself would give 
the greatest sacrifice of divine love, and send His Son 
to reveal Himself to man. He would unite Himself to 
man in the imperishable bond of nature. And thus as 
God-Man, Jesus would show trie truth of God's nature, 
the boundless need of man's nature, and at the same 
time the infinite loveliness of God's life as lived on earth 
amid human conditions. And so by Him would "the 
world be reconciled to God." 6 The sacrifice would be 
made complete. The Son of God would dwell with man, 

1 John x. TO. ■* John xviii. 37. 

2 Matt. ix. 13. 5 John iii. 16. 

2 John xii. 47. 6 2 Cor. v. 19; Heb. ii. 17. 



"THAT HOLY THING." 19 

learning even the worst that sin could do, though Him- 
self without sin ; becoming its victim, and dying in sac- 
rificial atonement to save men from their sins. It is not 
our province now to enter upon any statement, much 
less philosophy, of the nature of the atonement to be 
effected by the Son of God. That task is for a later 
page. The fact is all we need to keep in mind. The 
purpose of God, the desire of the Father to bring His 
children to Himself, and to redeem the world to its best 
destiny, was to be worked out by the Christ. The truth 
of God revealed in this Word, the spoken God, was to 
show men the way, to heaven, and to bring them into 
reconciliation with God. This was the end for which 
Jesus was born and lived, — " that He might be among us, 
until we should behold His glory as of the only begotten 
of the Father, full of grace and truth." 1 

If the advent of such a being was thus necessary for 
the salvation of the world, it was not only probable but 
necessary that He should be born of a Virgin, Was it to 
secure purity in Him? Not at all; for even thus the 
ordinary laws of heredity might have given Him through 
Mary many physical and mental taints that had come 
down the long stream of her lineage until her own na- 
ture was imparted to Him. Nor was it that the Holy 
Ghost might find His contact with human clay unpol- 
luting. Were it necessary for the Holy Ghost to find 
always an immaculate abiding-place, the poor souls of 
myriads of sinners now redeemed would have been in 
hopeless case ; the Spirit would have been less gracious 
than the sun that pours its rays freely and without pol- 

i John i. 14. 



20 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

lution on places of pestilence till they are healed. It is 
true, we find a fitness in the innocence of Mary to wel- 
come the influences that were divine. We can hardly 
imagine the choice of an unclean and polluted woman 
to be the mother of the Lord. But it was not on this 
account that a virgin was chosen. If Mary had been 
already the wife of Joseph and mother of children by 
him, her station would have been as honorable, her 
moral nature as uncontaminated, her purity as spotless 
as it had ever been in girlhood. Marriage does not dis- 
honor. Wife and mother may be as pure as any maid. 
Honorable love carries no stain, and fatherhood and 
motherhood are sacred as ordained of God. It was an 
imputation of an unnatural impurity to the marriage- 
rite, when it was imagined that by remaining unmarried 
a person gained sanctity. There is not a word in Scrip- 
ture to indicate that the union of the sexes in lawful 
love is unholy, and it is everywhere taken for granted 
that a celibate condition is contrary in ordinary circum- 
stances to the law of God. The utterance of an apostle 
upon the subject distinctly assigns his reason for advis- 
ing certain persons, whose calling would require entire 
self-devotion and the practical deprivation of home, not 
to marry; but there is no hint that any unholiness 
would attach to the marriage even of these. It could 
not have been for this that Gabriel was sent to a virgin 
with his great message of favor, though strangely enough 
this has been the thought uppermost in the minds of 
men in all times. 

Moreover, suppose for a moment that it was for purity, 
absolute and perfect, that the mother of Jesus was a 



"THAT HOLY THING." 21 

virgin. What is gained for the great purpose for which 
He came unto the world ? There is an addition, forced 
and unnatural, to the miraculous nature of the event, and 
the divinity of the new Saviour finds an adventitious and 
unnecessary emphasis. On the other hand is the distinct 
loss of the hereditary union in Jesus of the perfect and 
spotless Divinity and the sinful and polluted humanity 
that He came to save. If we believe the Virgin Mary 
to have been like all the other women of Israel, shariDg 
in their common human-nature, child indeed of Abraham 
and Isaac and Jacob, daughter in very truth of David, 
with a genealogy to be traced through sinful men, then 
we can see that from the very first it was the undeserved 
grace of God that came to her, and the grace of God that 
took up into union with the divine in Jesus the sinful- 
ness of the race. Seek no miraculous and unwritten 
virtue for Mary, and you have then a Saviour indeed, 
one whose human mother gave to Him our human woes, 
which He was thenceforth to bear in Himself for redemp- 
tion and cure. Let Mary be like any other Jewish maid, 
except, as we note hereafter, her lineage, which fulfilled 
the prophecies of her people ; then we find in Jesus indeed 
our Brother, knowing our frame, sharing our very life, 
" tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin ; " with- 
out sin, because at once, by the very virtue of Incarnation, 
the Holy redeemed the unholy, and "in Him," from His 
first conception, "was no sin." In Him and in Him 
only was no sin. Never is there any statement that 
Mary was without sin. But in Him Mary's nature 
became pure, as does the nature of all, who are made 
one with Him 



•» 



THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 



What, then, was the reason for the choice of a virgin 
to be the mother of the Christ? It is found in the 
need that the divine paternity must be forever beyond 
question. To this unmarried one, to her whose child 
would be known by all not to be the child of any earthly 
husband, must be given the honour to become " wife unto 
the Holy Ghost" The "Holy Thing" to be born of 
her must always be accepted as the Son of God. No 
man should ever rightly say, that Jesus differed from 
other men only in the degree in which holiness dwelt 
in His soul. The world to which He came must dis- 
criminate His nature. His first baby-breath must be 
that of true Mediator. And so it was equally necessary 
that He should be born of woman, but be also Son of 
God. Born of a virgin, but "conceived by the Holy 
Ghost," the Anointed Saviour, the Eeconciler of Heaven 
and earth, bore in Himself the Sonship of God and the 
Brotherhood of men. 

And thus He was more than a child of Abraham and 
the brother of the Jew. He was the Son of Man because 
He was not the son of a man. There was a reason why 
He should come from the Jewish people, as will appear 
in a moment. But as He was the Redeemer of man- 
kind, He could not be of one family alone. As His 
paternity was of Heaven, His nature was of our univer- 
sal manhood, that "whosoever believe th on Him," whether 
Jew or Gentile, His contemporary or the last man on 
earth, might know the love of God, and not be stranger 
to the nature of God. Therefore the accompaniments 
of His birth were not merely Jewish. To Eastern astrolo- 
gers, in the way which they best could understand, the 



"THAT HOLY THING." 23 

time and place of His birth were made known. The one 
aged Jew, who had waited long and expectantly in 
the Temple to see the Salvation of Israel, at once hailed 
the babe as bringing a " salvation " which God had " pre- 
pared before all people ; a light to lighten the Gentiles, 
and the glory of His people Israel." 1 The angels, 
though they sang to wondering shepherds on Judsean 
hills, sang the world's evangel, for they gave it to all 
" men of good will." 2 But how strange this " good news " 
was, and how prone men would be to restrict the new sal- 
vation to a favored race, if He had been born of merely 
Jewish parentage, is evident at once from the thoughts 
of all those who were most interested in the great event, 
with the exception of the angels, the aged Simeon, and 
the representatives of the Gentile world, to whom the 
Epiphany was given. The father and mother of John 
the Baptist had no message given to them of the great- 
ness of the salvation, of which their son was to be 
the prophet, and their words are only of the coming 
day of glory for Israel? Mary, when she meets Elisa- 
beth, salutes her with an inspired Psalm of the divine 
help for her people.* The learned men of the nation, 
when appealed to by the wise men from the East, have 
no suspicion that the old-time prophecies of their sacred 
books were even in that moment fulfilled, and they 
answered only with a quotation about Bethlehem and 
a Governor, who should rule his people Israel. 5 All 
seemed to have prevision that a greater than David 
or Solomon had come, but only to redeem Israel and 

1 Luke ii. 32. * Luke i. 41, 59-80. 5 Matt. ii. 6. 

2 Luke ii. 14. 4 Luke i. 46-55. 



24 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

to confirm the children of Abraham as the children of 
God. It is a sign of the natural tendencies of human 
thought which must be negatived at once, if the truth 
were to become the possession of the world. If Jesus 
was born, as He said, 1 to bear witness to the truth, then 
this error must be revealed at once, and His nature and 
mission as the Son of Man must be shown. He came 
unto His own indeed. But His own were of far larger 
number, and of races more diverse, than men could real- 
ize at first. As well might one household claim all the 
sunshine for itself, as the Jewish race believe that their 
Messiah, so long foretold as exercising rule also over 
the Gentiles, should belong to them alone. The sun is 
a thing of the sky, and shines for all the earth. And 
Jesus was the Light of the world. These things " were 
not done in a corner," not merely in little Judaea and 
in the Bethlehem that was least of the cities of Judah, 
but in the world and from God. His parentage, there- 
fore, was not of one race, but He belonged to mankind. 
To his people, indeed, He was sent first, and He was 
their Messiah, though they knew it not. But His light 
was not the candle-glimmer of the Jewish race alone; 
He was the Sun of Kighteousness for all the world, 
because though born of Mary, He was also the Son of 
God, who was the Creator and Universal Father of 
mankind. 

But even with this mission to the world, it was nat- 
ural that He should be born in the midst of the Jewish 
people, and in the line of all their prophecies. From 
the earliest ages this people had been remarkable for 

1 John xviii. 37. 



"THAT HOLY THING." 25 

their monotheism. Surrounded on all sides by polythe- 
istic nations, their whole history is one great moral 
struggle against idolatry. Jehovah, One God, making 
and keeping covenant with His people, " a jealous God," 
guarding Israel from all alien loves, and keeping for 
Himself through every vicissitude this nation, — Jehovah 
alone was Israel's God. The history, the faith, the rit- 
ual, the literature of this people would lead even the 
least thoughtful student to the conclusion that from this 
nation, if at all, would be likely to appear the represent- 
ative of God among men. Centuries of promise and 
prophecy led to the confident expectation among the 
Jews themselves that the great Deliverer of the world 
would be their Messiah, — an expectation yet held tena- 
ciously by the great body of the Jews who have not 
received Jesus as the fulfilment of their hopes. Prophet 
after prophet, singer after singer, had kept the national 
heart and mind true to the coming One. Every day had 
the sacrifices of the Temple typified the great Sacrifice 
that was to come. The first declaration of angels, the 
first utterance of those who saw His advent, proclaimed 
again the sayings of old, and in the words of their Scrip- 
tures welcomed the heavenly Babe. Though He was 
the Saviour of the world, to whose nature no human 
being was to be alien, it was natural that He should be 
born of this people, of the royal line of David, to rule 
over His people Israel. 

But with His origin from the royalty of heaven and 
of earth, He was born of the common people, accessible 
to all. It is not necessary to understand that poverty 
was His lot, but only that His was the condition of ordi- 



26 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

nary life. His parents were not admitted to the inn, not 
because they could not pay the charges, but because it 
was already full. But while the birth in the stable was 
thus an apparent accident, we cannot help believing that 
if Joseph and Mary had come to Bethlehem with the 
pomp of great wealth, or of princely condition, room 
would have been made for them in the inn. Neither 
abject poverty nor conspicuous prosperity was theirs. It 
was quite in accord with the conditions to be met in 
His coming among men, that Christ's appearance was 
of this character. Coming as the world's Saviour, He 
came in such guise as the world would welcome most 
readily. If He had come " with observation," born in a 
palace, clothed in princely garb, surrounded by an obse- 
quious court, secluded from the public gaze, the child of 
the most pampered luxury, and with all the power of 
the nations and the glory of them at His command, He 
would not have been the world's Saviour. Such sur- 
roundings of His cradle would have been a devil's gift. 1 
The rich would have flattered and feared ; the poor would 
never have drawn nigh ; the sinful would have plunged 
deeper into evil ; the sorrowing would have looked else- 
where for sympathy ; the despairing would have seen no 
halo of hope gilding such a throne. The manger-cradle 
was better. The annunciation to shepherds was more in 
accord with the Messiah's mission. It needs no com- 
mentary upon the Scriptures of the Advent to show what 
every age, every clime, every race of man exhibits. The 
poor will not come to the rich, the lowly will not seek 
the great, to find the comforts of fellowship and the help 

1 Luke iv. 5. 



"THAT HOLY THING." 27 

for poverty or sorrow. But the rich will go to the poor, 
and they do, in constant love and pity. A reversal of 
the rule is rarely if ever seen. Kings might bow around 
the Babe who lay cradled in the stone trough from which 
cattle were fed; but peasants could not and would not 
have tried to gain access to a baby prince, whose glory 
was great and of the world's reckoning. What fellow- 
ship has darkness with light ? The dark mind, the dark 
lot do not seek the light. Poverty, ignorance, crime, woe, 
do not voluntarily seek the light. Even the innocent 
poor are sensitive and suspicious of all who are in better 
circumstances than they. It is for the rich to make the 
advance and give their service unsought. Wealth, educa- 
tion, rightness, joy, overleap all barriers, and flow down 
to those who lie beneath. Hopeless, then, would the 
world's woes have been, if Heaven had not condescended 
to the poorest, to the lowliest. It was necessary, if poor 
and rich alike were to share in the salvation, that the 
Anointed One should come in the family of the peasant 
or the common artisan. The Advent was thus most rea- 
sonable. As Jesus was proclaimed first to the shepherds 
upon the Judaean hills and received their wondering wor- 
ship, so to the end of time He will be the Friend of the 
poor, and the common people will hear Him gladly. His 
coming appeals to angels, to shepherds, to Eastern magi 
laden with rich gifts, to all men of good will. The old 
Christmas carol enshrines the truth in its quaint but 
beautiful rhymes: — 

" He neither shall be born 
In housen, nor in hall, 
Nor in the place of Paradise, 
But in an ox's stall. 



28 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

" He neither shall be clothed 
In purple, nor in pall, 
But all in fair linen 
As were babies all. 

"He neither shall be rocked 
In silver, nor in gold, 
But in a wooden cradle 
That rocks on the mould." 

It needs must be, if the Son of God was to be a Saviour 
to all men. And so it happens that what was mere ana- 
chronism in those artists who have painted the Christ as 
a dweller in the artist's own land, becomes beautifully 
significant to our faith. Hans Holbein clothed the Ma- 
donna and Child in Dutch garments, and surrounded 
them with the kneeling forms of Burgomeisters and 
Dutch dames. Eaphael loved to place Mary and her 
Child in the foreground of an Italian landscape. Both 
were right. Jesus was native to every land, for He was 
the Son of Man. He was the Saviour of His own people 
Israel, but in His face shone the glory of God for all men. 
The song that hailed His birth was one of " Glory to God 
in the highest, Peace on earth to men of good will" 



II. 

THE LUMINOUS BOYHOOD. 

ONLY a single gleam of light shines from the boy- 
hood of Jesus in the story of the Gospels ; but it 
is enough to make all those hidden years luminous, and 
from the few words we see what He was, and how He 
grew in favor with God and man in the interval between 
the infancy and the beginning of His public work. 

"And when they had performed all things according to the 
law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city, 
Nazareth. And the child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled 
with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him. Now His 
parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the pass- 
over. And when He was twelve years old they went up to Jeru- 
salem after the custom of the feast. And when they had fulfilled 
the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in 
Jerusalem ; and Joseph and His mother knew not of it. But 
they, supposing Him to have been in the company, went a day's 
journey; and they sought Him among their kinsfolk and 
acquaintance. And when they found Him not, they turned back 
again to Jerusalem, seeking Him. And it came to pass that 
after three days they found Him in the temple, sitting in the 
midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them ques- 
tions. And all that heard Him were astonished at His under- 
standing and answers. And when they saw Him, they were 
amazed: and His mother said unto him : Son, why hast Thou 
thus dealt with us 1 Behold Thy father and I have sought Thee 



30 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

sorrowing. And He said unto them : How is it that ye sought 
Me? Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business] 
And they understood not the saying which He spake unto them. 
And He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was 
subject unto them : but His mother kept all these sayings in her 
heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor 
with God and man." 1 

This is all. In passing we may note the singular reti- 
cence, and its tribute to the simple faith and single pur- 
pose of the sacred narrative. Thirty years are written 
in a few sentences. We have but to turn to the apocry- 
phal gospels of The Infancy to see what the hand of 
fraud would do in elaborating this period. Even the 
learned and devout scholars of Christendom write whole 
chapters concerning the probable training and employ- 
ments of a Jewish boy in Nazareth, seeking to picture 
the scenes of these silent and hidden years with all the 
art that a reverent scholarship may permit. But the 
Gospels make no such attempt. The silence is in itself 
an eloquent testimony to the sincerity of the writers, 
who would not go beyond what was known and essential 
to their one purpose. Not even under what must have 
been to them as great stress of temptation as to any 
modern biographer of Christ, would they suffer their 
imaginations to play with their sacred theme. They 
were writing with one definite purpose in view. They 
were to transmit to others their own knowledge of the 
nature and work of Jesus. They were not romancers, 
nor did they care to excite interest beyond what would 
naturally follow the recital of facts. 

i Luke ii. 39-52. 



THE LUMINOUS BOYHOOD. 31 

Doubtless the boyhood of Jesus was comparatively 
uneventful. The incident at Jerusalem stood alone. It 
showed the waking intelligence, the desire to learn from 
the doctors of His people, the appreciation that His Father's 
business was pressing upon Him, and that for this already 
He must begin to live. It was the great event of His 
childhood of a public, or half-public character. It excited 
attention; it awakened among the chief persons of the 
nation a question as to this boy, so strangely precocious, 
and so wonderful in His spiritual insight. There is no 
evidence that the child usurped the office of a teacher at 
this time. "Both hearing them and asking them ques- 
tions " are the words that express His attitude with refer- 
ence to the scribes and priests in whose company He was 
found. What days or hours of meditation previous to 
His twelfth year the boy had had, no one can say. Pos- 
sibly His " questions " showed only some sudden impulse 
as He listened to the disputings of the scribes, or sought 
some interpretation from them of the law, which He had 
been taught at school. But He knew that He was about 
His Father's business in thus learning in the Temple. 
The time was coming when He would speak there " with 
authority, and not as the scribes." But now he " ques- 
tioned," and they wondered as they heard; they were 
"astonished at His understanding and answers." He 
too was questioned, and already the scribes found in 
Him a deeper knowledge of their law, a truer appreci- 
ation of its spiritual import, than they had found in all 
their subtlety of interpretation. Already "never boy 
spake like this boy." 1 This single incident is enough to 

1 John vii. 46. 



32 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

show that at the a^e of twelve He was aware of His 
high mission, though how far His knowledge of it went 
we cannot soy. 

But when at last His parents found Him in the 
Temple, He submitted at once to their authority. If 
His Father's business had detained Him three days in 
the Temple, that same business would now require Him 
to live as boys should live, and so He went back to 
Nazareth and the years of quiet. There was no thought 
of stepping out of the humble life of a boy because He 
was Lord and Saviour, the Anointed of God to be the 
world's King. If at this early time He fully knew that 
such was His nature and destiny, He was in a position 
in which any common boy would have been likely to 
assert himself in some obnoxious way, with some attempt 
to command already, or with at least a restive spirit 
resentful under rebuke and impatient of authority. But 
such a spirit was farthest from the boy Jesus. There 
was no premature exercise of power. He returned with 
His parents, and " was subject unto them." 

So reads the Scripture. But the so-called Gospels 
of the Infancy to which we have referred, have such 
inanities as these : " And when the Lord Jesus was 
seven years of age, he was on a certain day with other 
boys his companions about the same age. Who when 
they were at play, made clay into several shapes, namely, 
asses, oxen, birds, and other figures, each boasting of 
his work, and endeavouring to exceed the rest. Then the 
Lord Jesus said to the boys, I will command these figures 
which I have made to walk. And immediately they 
moved, and when he commanded them to return, they 



THE LUMINOUS BOYHOOD. 33 

returned. He had also made the figures of birds and 
sparrows, which, when he commanded to fly, did fly, 
and when he commanded to stand still, did stand still ; 
and if he gave them meat and drink, they did eat and 
drink. When at length the boys went away and related 
these things to their parents, their fathers said to them, 
Take heed, children, for the future, of his company, for 
he is a sorcerer ; shun and avoid him, and from hence- 
forth never play with him." 1 Another prank in a dyer's 
shop is related in the same chapter, when Jesus took 
all the cloths that were lying ready to be dyed, and threw 
them into the furnace. The dyer cried out: "What 
hast thou done to me, thou Son of Mary ? Thou hast 
injured both me and my neighbours ; they all desired 
their cloths a proper colour, but thou hast come and 
spoiled them all." He replied, " I will change the colour 
of every cloth to what colour thou desirest;" and then 
" he presently began to take the cloths out of the furnace, 
and they were all dyed of those same colours which the 
dyer desired. And when the Jews saw this surprising 
miracle, they praised God." In like manner it is related 
how, if Joseph made a mistake in his carpentry, Jesus 
always helped him out of the trouble by simply pulling 
the gates, boxes, thrones, or what not, into the proper size 
and shape. And not always do these false writings 
ascribe to him miracles of benevolence ; but in fits of 
anger he would paralyze the arms of boys who struck 
him, or strike dead those who opposed him or accidentally 
ran against him in the street. 2 It needs no word to 
emphasize the contrast between such fictions, and the 

1 Gospels of Infancy, I. xv. 1-7. 2 Ibid., I. xix. 22. 

3 



34 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

reserve, the repose, the dignity of the narration of the 
boyhood in the canonical Gospels. 

In the simple record that He went hack to Nazareth 
with His parents and " was subject unto them," 1 we 
have the reasonable record of all those years of quiet 
preparation for His great work. It was the same pre- 
paration that every man must have, by which to learn 
self-restraint and gain that experience of life, which at 
last will result in strength of character to endure and 
accomplish. From the earliest years to the last He was 
" to learn obedience by the things He should suffer." 2 
Already He had begun to live the life which would be 
marked everywhere by obedience. Already He began to 
develop the perfect character, which by and by would be 
called upon to meet the most awful strains, the severest 
testing. And that perfection was developed in the only 
way possible, the only way in which any human character 
can become strong and fit to lead men in the way of 
life. 

"He was subject unto His parents." Submission to 
authority the human race had refused. Sin against God, 
the denial of His Fatherhood, the arrogance of self-will, 
the usurpation of the throne of morals by the self- 
confident human soul, — these were the very sins that 
had been the undoing of men. " To be meek and lowly 
of heart ; " 3 " to esteem others better than yourselves ;" 4 
" to be poor in spirit ; " 5 to " fulfil law," 6 and " not to 
destroy it ; " to be trustful and dependent, 7 as the lilies 

i Luke ii. 51. 4 Phil. ii. 3. 6 Matt. v. 17. 

2 Heb. v. 8. 6 Matt. v. 3. 7 Matt. vi. 26. 

8 Matt. xi. 29. 



THE LUMINOUS BOYHOOD. 35 

of the field or the fowls of the air ; not only " to say, 
Lord, Lord, but to do the will of the Father in Heaven ; " * 
to cry under the most dreadful stress, " nevertheless not 
my will, but Thine be done," 2 — these were things of the 
new life, that Jesus came to give. He could not give 
it until He had it. He could not teach obedience until 
He learned it. He could not prove Himself perfect, until 
He obeyed to the letter, and until His obedience went 
even deeper than the letter, in whatever was required 
of Him. On a later page this subject must be farther 
developed, but it meets us here in His very earliest life. 
The key-note, which was to govern all the wondrous 
harmony of His life, is struck in those few simple 
words : " He was subject unto them." The one essential 
thing for the perfection of His work was the perfection 
of His own character. And it was with Him as it is 
with every human being ; character is developed only 
by training, by submission to tests, by constant response 
to the appeal of duty. He was to grow from babyhood 
through boyhood to full manhood exactly as others grow, 
by the same processes maturing His powers and doing 
His life's work in the time of preparation, as well as in 
the period of fulfilment. So only could He "grow in 
favour with God and man " 3 as He grew in physical 
stature. 

But now the question will surely be asked : Why learn 
obedience ? Was He not divine ? Was not His pater- 
nity from God, and therefore was not all virtue innate ? 
Was He not at all times divinely endowed with all the 
attributes of God ? At least in His " divine part " was 

1 Matt. vii. 21. 2 Mark xiv. 36. 3 Luke ii. 52. 



36 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

He not thus beyond all need of instruction and possi- 
bility of growth ? 

It is a vicious method of regarding Jesus by which we 
assign one attribute, or act, to one part of His nature, and 
another to another part of His nature. He is to be regarded 
only as One Being, not a man of double consciousness ; 
not of human soul and divine soul ; not of twin natures 
refusing to mingle in one being, as oil and water in a 
clear glass may always be discerned in their own places. 
We intend no dissertation upon the mystery of Christ's 
person. "We may leave entirely the disputes of school- 
men and theologians, however interesting they may be, 
for our one effort is to study the Christ of the Gospels 
and see how reasonable He is. And just upon this point 
the Gospels are explicit. They never speak of the human 
nature and the divine nature of Jesus as separate and dis- 
tinct entities. " That Holy Thing " is always presented 
simply as Jesus the Christ. From the cradle to the 
ascension it is Jesus, Jesus only, who is the theme of 
discourse. If He is wearied and sits "thus" 1 on the 
well-curb, or if He is worn out with teaching and falls 
into deep sleep on the cushion of the fisherman's boat, 
it is nowhere said that the human part of Jesus was 
thus exhausted. If He speaks one word and stills a 
storm, or puts forth His hand and lifts the dead to life, 
the Gospels never say that He did it by His divine power. 
Sometimes we stupidly seek to make this dissection of 
His nature, but the Scriptures always say, " He spake ; 
He did the deed." It was Jesus, the Mediator, the One 
Being, in whom the divine and human dwelt in insep- 
1 John iv. 6. 



THE LUMINOUS BOYHOOD. 37 

arable union, who was wearied, who suffered, who grew, 
who learned ; and it was Jesus whose human power is 
never to be distinguished from the divine power, who 
stilled the storm, healed diseased folk, forgave sins, and 
arose from the dead. The narrative is thus consistent 
from its first word to its last. And this fact is to be 
borne in mind throughout our whole discussion. 

Accordingly, there was much that Jesus must learn. 
He was to grow in favor with God and man, as any being 
must grow who is not independent of earthly surround- 
ings and temporal conditions. We make no denial of 
true deity in Him, and there is nothing inconsistent with 
His divine origin from the Heavenly Father, when we 
see in Him one who divested Himself by the very fact 
of Incarnation of the " glory that He had with the Father 
before the world was," a and " made Himself of no repu- 
tation." 2 He "took upon Him the form of a servant, 
and was made in the likeness of men." 3 Otherwise He 
would have been too far removed from the " likeness " 
of those whom He came to save, to be in any essential 
brotherhood with them, or to know anything of the pain- 
ful processes by which the regeneration and rebuilding 
of lost character must be accomplished. He was lim- 
ited, as all other men are limited, by His environment. 
Experience of life on earth could come to Him only by 
living life through, day by day, to its end. His know- 
ledge was at any given moment not that of God alone, 
for though "God was in Christ," 4 God was not Christ, 
and Christ was not the eternal and omniscient Father. 

1 John xvii. 5. 3 Ibid. 

2 Phil. ii. 7. 4 2 Cor. v. 19. 



38 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

Jesus declared that there were things that He did not 
know. 1 He distinctly said that there were things He 
could not do, 2 owing to conditions existing outside of 
Himself. He had laid aside " glory," 3 and would receive 
that glory again 4 after His life and mission on earth 
were accomplished. Meanwhile He was subjected to 
that share of the lot of men, which was necessary to 
make Him our brother, an example to all, one "who 
was tried in all points like as we are, that He might 
be touched with the feeling of our infirmities," 5 and be 
made a perfected High Priest. 6 

When Jesus, therefore, returned to Nazareth and " was 
subject " unto His parents, He entered upon that course 
of life which was to be expected until the mission of 
His maturity should be possible. He learned obedience 
here in boyhood that He might obey even in manhood 
and even unto death 7 the will of His Father who was 
in heaven. He knew the life of a child in a Nazarene 
home. He studied in school as the Nazarene boys 
studied ; and if school-hours ever seem long and tedious 
to any Christian boy, it may help him to think that 
Jesus sat cross-legged on the floor of some house in 
Nazareth, while He repeated aloud the passages of the 
Old Testament until body and mind were alike weary 
in the prolonged effort to memorize the Scriptures, to 
which all Hebrew boys were subjected in His time. And 
yet that one scene in the Temple at Jerusalem, when 
He was twelve years of age, helps us. Not exactly as 
all other Hebrew boys could He have studied, who had 

i Mark xiii. 32. 3 Phil. ii. 7. 5 Heb. iv. 15. ' Phil. ii. 8. 

2 Matt. xiii. 58. * John xvii. 5. 6 Heb. ii. 16-18. 



THE LUMINOUS BOYHOOD. 39 

reasoned with the doctors, and even then had been eager 
to be about His Father's business. There must have 
been in Him, as He learned the Scriptures at His moth- 
er's knee, or at the school of the village-rabbi, a strange 
insight into the ancient word that would often puzzle 
His teachers, and an enthusiasm for His studies that 
even the most studious would rarely if ever feel. He 
was " learning obedience," and with what delight must 
He have read the word of Samuel : " Hath the Lord as 
great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obey- 
ing the voice of the Lord ? Behold, to obey is better 
than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." 
The loyalty of Psalmist and Prophet would find response 
in His deepest heart. The Messianic hope, wherever 
uttered, would thrill His soul with forecasts of fulfil- 
ment as He should "finish the work which had been 
given Him to do." Delight in the Word of God would 
kindle enthusiasm in Him like a clear flame of heav- 
enly fire. 

But all this delight would not save Him from the 
common weariness of the student. Perhaps the very 
burning of His soul would consume His energy the 
faster. He would allow no phase of truth to escape 
unnoticed. The three languages, Hebrew, Greek, and 
Aramaic, were familiar to Him, though the Hebrew had 
long been a dead language. But His quotations from 
the Old Testament indicate a familiarity with the 
Hebrew text as well as with the Greek of the Sep- 
tuagint, which was the translation then in common 
use. Plainly nothing but the most intimate and pains- 
taking knowledge of the sacred literature of His people 



40 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

would satisfy Him. His student-life was one of con- 
science, and here duty was dear to Him. 

So in all this period of silence in the Nazarene home, 
the later years of which we shall regard again when 
we come to see Him as a man in the home, He was 
subjected to the customary processes by which human 
life is shaped. His work doubtless did not preclude 
the sports of boyhood, which must have brought the glow 
of health to His browned cheek, and the rest of health 
to His little cot in the wall at night. But we need not 
picture with the realism which modern research into the 
manners and customs of the Jews would justify, the 
ordinary life of the Jewish boy at this time. It is enough 
to say, that through it all Jesus was receiving the ordi- 
nary discipline of life, learning its one great lesson, 
through all trial and every temptation proving that the 
will of His Father in heaven was better than any 
opposing will, and so subjecting Himself to the voice 
of authority, that even His boyhood was perfect. 

And what a wonderful and joyous thing it is to be a 
boy ! To have exuberant life ! To feel yourself growing ! 
To be so full of good spirits that you cannot walk except 
by special restraint, but must leap and run ! To know 
that life is before you ! To see manhood in the distance ! 
To think what you will be and do, when you are a man ! 
To be so rich in opportunity ! And yet never to be so 
taken up with the long look forward that you forget 
the present, — a present so full of content, so joyous, so 
free ! It is a great thing to be a boy. But to be a boy 
learning no evil ; indignant at wrong ; repudiating shame ; 
loving truth and honor ; shunning all pollution ; daring 



THE LUMINOUS BOYHOOD. 41 

to look every one in the eye because there is nothing 
to conceal ; with a heart pure as the leaping brook ; with 
a bravery that trembles only before a possibility of sin ; 
with lips unstained by any foulness, and a mind that is a 
fountain of good thoughts ; to be a boy chivalrous, right's 
best champion, pouring out happiness upon the world, 
anticipating manhood by a true man's work already, 
and showing the life of a gentle and gentlemanly soul, 
because it is the life of God in a boy, — this is a wonder- 
ful and beautiful thing indeed ! This is the kind of a 
boy Jesus must have been, according to the very few 
words we have about His boyhood. Thus He grew in 
favor with God and man, as He grew in stature ; and at 
last His true and strong manhood was but the develop- 
ment of His boyhood, as the flower bursts to its full 
and glorious bloom from the perfect bud. 



III. 

THE BAPTISM OF KIGHTEOUSNESS. 

TT 7"HEN boyhood and youth were over, is it a sur- 
* » prise to see Jesus coming to John the Baptist 
to be baptized of him in the Jordan ? The surprise van- 
ishes, when we hear His words, that answered the objec- 
tion raised by John : " Suffer it to be so now, for thus 
it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness." x Jesus was 
but continuing the work that had engaged all His boy- 
hood and youth. His baptism was no isolated act. It 
was only one step in that path of righteousness, which 
was necessary if " all righteousness," the whole pathway, 
were to be fulfilled. 

But why ? Was it not a mere form ? Could this 
plunge in the Jordan have any intrinsic force to add to 
His native fitness to be the Saviour of men ? If, as so 
many millions have believed, there is in baptism some 
magic or some supernatural power to cleanse the soul 
from sin ; if it was truly a regenerating bath, certainly 
He did not need it, who from the first had been without 
sin. It could not have been for cleansing that Jesus 
came to John. 

If we look at the rite itself, as it was administered by 
John the Baptist, and see its place in the economy of 

l Matt. iii. 15. 



THE BAPTISM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 43 

preparation for the Gospel, we shall understand better 
why Jesus should submit to it, and so "fulfil all 
righteousness." 

In four hundred years no prophet had spoken in 
Israel. The period had been one of degradation for 
the nation, with occasional gleams of hopefulness and 
heroism, and sometimes of prosperity. Wave after wave 
of foreign invasion had swept over the land. The toil 
and bloodshed of the devoted patriots, who had risen 
against the alien oppressors, seemed in vain. Hopeless- 
ness and fear settled down upon the people. With 
foreign mercenaries and heathen courts had come deca- 
dence in faith and morals. It must have seemed to 
devout Israelites that the darkest prophecies of their 
ancient books had never found such fulfilment as had 
now come, or must soon come, if indeed any worse 
fate could yet be in store. Even religion had degenerated 
into a heartless ritual, or a trivial subservience to the 
letter, which had proved fatal alike to Pharisee and 
Sadducee, driving the one to fanatical and bigoted zeal 
and the other to a materialistic rationalism. Eighteous- 
ness, spirituality, the love of good and of God that flows 
from a true fellowship with heaven, was like a hidden 
refugee in the secret hearts of a few choice men and 
women, who could not believe that Israel would be 
forsaken of God. 

Malachi, the last prophet of the old time, had not 
ceased to speak without foretelling the advent of One 
who would bring judgment to the earth. A day would 
dawn when there would be a discrimination, a separating 
between the good and the bad, a day of burning, when 



44 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

the good would be purified aud the bad would shrivel 
aud vanish like the stubble under flame. The Sun of 
Righteousness would arise with healing in His wings. 1 

But this advent of a righteous Saviour and Lord must 
have a preparation. The world must be roused to repent- 
ance. The Messiah must be preceded by Elijah. Once 
more the spirit of that old prophet would blaze forth 
like a fire, and a great spiritual awakening, a moral revo- 
lution, would occur, so that the heart of the fathers would 
be turned to the children, and the heart of the children 
to their fathers, 2 — words that the angel repeated to 
Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, when the birth 
and mission of John were foretold. "In the spirit and 
power of Elijah" John was to come. "The spirit and 
power," not the person of Elijah, would fulfil the proph- 
ecy. But the lack of spirituality of the Jews of the time 
of Malachi and the succeeding centuries may be well 
typified by this one fact, — that they took the prophecy in 
a material sense ; they believed that Elijah would return 
in person to set the order of the world right. They kept 
a place and set a chair for him at the circumcision of 
children. If articles of value were found and no owner 
claimed them, or when difficulties could not be solved, it 
was said, " Let it wait till Elijah comes." Even to our 
own times at every Passover the door of the room is set 
open, in the belief that at that hour Elijah may appear. 
But it was only "the spirit and the power of Elijah" 
that was promised, and these came in John the Baptist. 
He turned the hearts of the fathers to the children, and 
of the children to the fathers. The degenerate descend- 

1 Mai. iv. 2 Mai. iv. 6, and Luke i. 17. 



THE BAPTISM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 45 

ants of Abraham, the unworthy children of the former 
and greater age, were turned again to repentance. The 
old righteousness was rekindled in the new time. Elijah 
had been the prophet of fire, destroying, not constructing. 
John the Baptist was the prophet of fire, kindling a fire 
of repentance, " lest God should smite the earth with a 
curse." 1 Eepentance, or wrath, was the cry of Elijah. 
Eepent, and flee from the wrath to come, 2 was the mes- 
sage of John. 

But John was not only a prophet to Israel, as Elijah 
had been; he was the forerunner of Him, who, as we 
have seen, was to be a Saviour to all men. If, then, 
John's mission was to prepare for the world's Saviour, 
the sign, if he used any, by which the purpose of his 
mission should be shown must be no mere Jewish rite, 
though it must be one which the Jew could receive and 
understand. In the Jewish code there was but one rite 
that had a meaning so general, that in that code itself 
it was of constant and universal occurrence, and had 
never been incapacitated for the great purpose for which 
it was now to be adopted by any specific and restricted 
use. Burnt-offering, sin-offering, trespass and peace- 
offering, had their narrow limits of application. All such 
rites, too, had suffered alike from the degeneracy of the 
people, and had come to have little force as expressing 
a real renewal of life within the soul. But the rite that 
was used by the Jews to purify every other rite, the rite 
which must precede every formal offering and service, 
was really more than Levitical, of greater antiquity and 
wider acceptance, and of such clear significance that in 
i Mai. iv. 6. 2 Luke iii. 7-9. 



46 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

any land or age it would not fail to be symbolical of 
regeneration and purity. This rite was baptism. 

Ablution, or bathing, was common in almost all ancient 
nations as a preparation for any sacred duty. The Greeks 
and Eomans bathed before sacrifice. At the celebration 
of the Eleusinian mysteries, the m.ystce went in solemn 
procession to the sea-shore and bathed in the sea for cere- 
monial cleansing. In Egypt the priests bathed twice in 
the day and twice in the night as a preparation for their 
sacred offices. In Israel it was necessary to wash before 
every ceremonial, and at any time to bathe carefully the 
person, if there had been any contact with unclean things. 1 
Even the sacrifices themselves must be washed before 
they could be offered; and in Solomon's Temple there 
were ten great lavers, or tanks, for purifying the burnt- 
offerings. 2 The priests of the Temple bathed in the 
"molten sea" before sacrificing; and when the high- 
priest 3 was consecrated, baptism was the first of the 
three ordinances of which anointing and sacrifice were 
the last. And in this rite, it must be borne in mind, 
the spiritual cleansing, the significance of the outward 
act in the real inward condition of the mind, was never 
lost from view. It was as when Pilate washed his hands 
before the mob that clamored for the death of Jesus. 
The people cared nothing that Pilate's hands were clean ; 
they and he only cared to know that he freed himself 
from participation in the murder of that just man, and 
from responsibility for it. Christ's blood must be on 
them, not on Pilate. 

1 Gen. xxxv. 2; Ex. xix. 10; Lev. xvii. 15 ; Deut. xxiii. 11 ; Lev. xxii. 
4, 6 ; Lev. xvi. 26 ; John xi. 55. 

2 2Chron. iv. 2-6. 8 Ex. xxix. 4: Lev. viii. 6. 



THE BAPTISM OE KIGHTEOUSNESS. 47 

Baptism was thus a very ancient ordinance, known 
everywhere in some form, and with the Jews always 
having a profound spiritual force, and therefore con- 
stantly employed as an introduction to the greatest 
religious actions of their lives. It was specially used 
to prepare for priestly or sacrificial functions, both of 
which Jesus was soon to assume. Moreover, this was 
the only Jewish rite of equal importance which John 
was free to administer in the wilderness, for it was used 
by the Jews with far greater freedom than anointing, 
or any form of sacrifice. 

That this baptism of John appealed at once to the 
conscience of the nation we have abundant testimony in 
the Gospels. Crowds went out to him, awakened by 
his stern rebukes and glad to flee from the sinfulness 
of the age, which according to this preacher was soon 
to pass away and a new age dawn. The voice of John, 
" crying in the wilderness," and the baptism of John 
with its symbolism unmistakable, brought thousands to 
repentance and confession. Nor were the penitents 
of the Jews alone. Eoman soldiers came and asked, 
" And what shall we do ? " Already these " aliens from 
the commonwealth of Israel," oppressors and foes, came 
as representatives of the heathen world, and were touched 
by the appeal to conscience and received the baptism of 
water. The lofty and the lowly, the rich citizen of 
Jerusalem and Jericho and the peasant of Galilee, tax- 
gatherers and soldiers, men of all faiths and no faith, 
heard the voice calling them to forsake sin. And then 
the plunge in the flowing river was the glad recognition 
by each penitent that he had confessed the evil of his 



4S THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

heart, and in the mercy of God had sought to wash 
away all wrong from his life. 

Suddenly Jesus appeared upon the river-bank and 
demanded to be baptized. The same thought leaped to 
John's mind, that comes to ours : " Not so ! This is 
baptism for remission of sins. Thou hast no sin. John 
hath need to be baptized of Thee." But Jesus answered 
calmly, " Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh 
us to fulfil all righteousness." It was not a confession of 
sin on His part. He makes no claim to the rite because 
He would be bathed in the laver of regeneration. He 
virtually grants John's objection, and merely says : 
" Yield for the time," " suffer it," " we must fulfil right- 
eousness." In other words, a thorough and open commit- 
ment to righteousness is demanded of every man. If 
any being be perfectly holy, yet he must show that 
holiness in every way which is demanded by custom, 
or circumstance. It was not for Jesus to stand apart 
from this scene, in which John was carrying out the 
plan of God, and ushering in the new day of grace. The 
one symbol of righteousness now was this immersion in 
the glistening stream, as for ages sacrificial victim and 
sacrificing priest had been alike bathed before the offer- 
ing was made, and as, through ages yet to come, a 
similar immersion in water would be a sign of consecra- 
tion and renewed life in the Spirit of God. Should 
Jesus have no part in the declaration of righteousness '? 
Should He give no sign of spiritual fellowship and 
sympathy with all these multitudes, who desired a new 
and good life ? In this great turning to God, should He 
hold aloof and miss the great chance of formally iden- 



THE BAPTISM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 49 

tifying Himself with the new era ? Above all, if it was 
His purpose to perpetuate this rite, and ask from every 
disciple this public consecration, should He refuse to 
suffer and to do all, that He asked of others for His 
sake ? He could not. This was a righteous deed. Then 
He must do it. He would not " fulfil all righteousness," 
if He did not do it. 

We have, then, these answers to our question, why 
the baptism of Jesus was necessary to the fulfilment 
of all righteousness, the perfection of His life: — 

It was the one good deed, by which He could most 
forcibly declare His righteousness and identify Him- 
self with the new regeneration of His time and of the 
world by the same act and sign employed by all around 
Him. But besides this, it was the inauguration for Him 
of a public career. By a rite that all men would under- 
stand, and yet a rite that would in no wise separate 
Him from His own nation, He would proclaim Himself 
as set apart for His work. All men were accustomed 
to lustrations as a religious form, when any great service 
was to be performed, when any great sacrifice was to be 
offered, when any great office was to be assumed. In 
all these respects Jesus showed the importance of the 
hour. He was to enter upon a great service. He was 
to assume the great office of the spiritual High Priest 
of mankind. He was at last to become the victim of 
His service, He was to die as the Lamb of sacrifice. The 
sacrifice, therefore, was washed in the laver, the High 
Priest was bathed before He stood before the altar. 
To the men who witnessed the scene at the Jordan, 
this was not known, except to the one preacher, the 



50 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

prophet who hailed the coming Christ as The Lamb 
of God. 

Again, in this service Jesus was ever to be meek and 
lowly. Exaltation was to come only by submission. He 
was to found a kingdom indeed, but as its king, He 
was to wear only a crown of thorns. Its throne was to 
be a cross. " Let him who would be great among you 
be your minister, and whosoever of you will be the 
chiefest shall be the servant of all," was to be the motto 
on the shield of the kingdom. Where, then, an earthly 
king would have gone to his coronation of pomp and 
pride, this King "humbled Himself," suffered Himself 
to be baptized by another ; and that other was less holy 
than He. By no exceptional sign would He be set apart 
to lordship, but by the common symbol to which all men 
were then eagerly submitting would He show His part 
and sympathy with them in a position of humility before 
God. He was meek and lowly of heart. If long after- 
ward the washing of the disciples' feet by the Lord was 
a sign of meekness and an example to His followers, the 
baptism in the Jordan at the hands of a sinful man was 
the sign of the new era of good-will, the new reign of 
divine love on earth. 

Finally, though it was not known at the time, this 
plunge in the Jordan was to be the accepted symbol of 
the new Church, the world over, in every age, by which 
repenting men should enter into it. Simple, impressive, 
significant, it would at the same time be possible. It 
was not necessary that the waters of the Jordan should 
be used, for there was no special sacredness attached to 
that river, nor was any special blessing needed to con- 



THE BAPTISM OE RIGHTEOUSNESS. 51 

secrate water anywhere for this purpose. In all His 
later commands Jesus never hinted at any necessity of 
this kind. Men have foisted strange notions upon the 
simple rite, but primitive usage was free from them. 
Burial in water was the only essential thing. Whether 
in the flowing stream under the open sky, or in the 
shallows of the sea, or in the great baptisteries erected 
in the Middle Ages, or in fonts of village churches, the 
act would be the same. The Jordan at Bethabara, the 
wells at Salim, the pool of Siloam at Jerusalem, the prison- 
fountain at Philippi, the wayside spring in the desert on 
the road to Africa, were alike scenes of holy baptism. 
Jesus chose no form of consecration that was dependent 
on place or extraordinary circumstance. It was a rite 
possible to all men and significant to all. Thus could 
He with right make it a duty for all. No human being 
who is of moral responsibility, whose conscience hears 
the call to repentance and to a holy life, whose circum- 
stances are those of a common humanity, can be free 
from the obligation of Christ, to follow Him and to join 
with all who are His in this one sign of devotion and 
consecration. By baptism no man would be saved. In 
the act itself was no mysterious power of regeneration. 
Christ's submission to it proves as much as this. But 
as the sacred sign, as the speaking symbol, of the inward 
change and the renewed moral state, which were already 
accomplished facts, baptism was to be forever the chosen 
form for those who follow Jesus into His kingdom. 

In accordance with this purpose He gave His com- 
mandment at the very last before going away to His 
Father: "Go ye, teach all nations, baptizing them into 



52 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." 1 
His disciples were to be in more intimate relationship 
with Him than that of master and pupil. They were to 
be of His own nature. He had made Himself bone of 
their bone, flesh of their flesh. They were to become 
spirit of His spirit. They were to be His brethren, sons 
of God, the temples of the Holy Ghost. Possibly it was 
only for His sake that at His baptism a voice was heard 
out of Heaven, saying, " This is my beloved Son in whom 
I am well pleased;" and it may have been for Him alone, 
that the Holy Spirit descended to rest upon Him. But 
certainly we who enter into the divine Family, being 
baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the 
Holy Ghost, may remember that in His baptism, as in 
every other experience of His life, He was fulfilling all 
righteousness for our sakes, and was an example and 
Saviour for us. It would seem, then, most natural, not 
only that the Father should speak to Him in this special 
consecration, and the Spirit come to Him, but also that 
the names in the Trinity should be joined together when 
the repenting and loving believer enters by the same 
sign into eternal communion with God. 

It was a simple thing for the Christ to come to John 
and be baptized of him ; but it caused the heavens to be 
opened, the voice of the Father to be heard, and the 
Spirit to descend and rest upon Him, because He had 
shown Himself ready to do every act of righteousness. 
We question if any true soul ever consecrated himself 
to God in the same way without also having the assur- 
ance that Heaven was well pleased with him; without 

1 Matt, xxviii. 19. 



THE BAPTISM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 53 

hearing the voice of God in approval, and finding the 
Holy Spirit coming into real union with his own spirit. 
By such consecration of self; by such commitment to 
service ; by such typical obedience, in which the whole 
future life is mirrored as faithfully as the physical form 
is mirrored in the glassy stream ; by such spiritual burial x 
to the old life of sin, and such resurrection to a new life 
of pure desires and holy effort, as is pictured in this 
sacred rite, we come as with a prayer to be admitted into 
the family of God. Baptism is a prayer, and the answer 
to it from Heaven is prompt : " Beloved, now are we the 
sons of God." 2 "It doth not yet appear what we shall 
be," for sons grow daily, and the likeness of character 
and form to the Father develops daily; but already 
are we made His children, and may believe that He is 
"well-pleased." 

1 Rom. vi. 4; Col. ii. 12. 2 1 John iii. 2. 



IV. 

THE NAZARENE FAMILY. 

"TTHTH His baptism Jesus turned away from the 
* * quiet life in Nazareth, and began that heavenly 
ministry, which was to change the character of the world. 
But before we follow His public career we pause to look 
more closely at the years not properly included in His 
boyhood, and to glean from them some knowledge of 
what His contribution to the Nazaiene home was. and 
to learn something concerning the homes that He loved. 
What would be the life in our homes most Christlike, 
and what for all men are His teachings about the rela- 
tions, which are the foundation and the blessing of the 
home ? 

If we regard the probable course of Jesus in His own 
home in Nazareth between boyhood and the age of 
thirty, there can be little doubt that He worked at the 
bench in Joseph's shop. It is not at all likely that He 
spent these years in any dreamy mysticism, in any 
unpractical seclusion. Like any other youth, who was 
subject to his parents, Jesus would be early taught His 
father's trade. There is no hint that He stood apart 
from His own family in any respect until His hour came 
for beginning the work of His manhood. When that 
hour came, no thought of home or friends kept Him back 



THE NAZARENE FAMILY. 55 

from duty, any more than the boy to-day, who comes 
to manhood, refuses to hear the call of the world's work 
and press forward to the life of business, which separates 
him from his former surroundings. In finally leaving 
His Nazarene home Jesus did nothing uncommon ; nor 
is His future homelessness to be interpreted as a slight 
upon the domestic affections. It was only the reasonable 
course which every man pursues, each one heeding his 
own call, Christ going forth to His Work ; you, reader, 
going forth to yours. 

The family at Nazareth doubtless was composed of 
Joseph and Mary, Jesus, and His younger brothers 
and sisters, as enumerated in the passage, Matt. xiii. 55, 56. 
Certainly the prima facie evidence of this passage and 
of others is, that these were the true brothers and 
sisters of Jesus, and not more distant relatives. 1 And 
if, as we have seen upon a former page, there is no need 
of claiming for Mary that perpetual virginity, which 
probably lies at the origin of the theories that would 
make these persons the cousins of Jesus, we find it 
easy and natural to take the record as it stands. These 
brothers were James and Joseph and Simon and Judas, 
but the sisters are not named in the Gospel. Tradition 
says they were two in number, named Esther and Tamar. 

1 This question, upon which volumes have been written, of course can- 
not receive extended treatment here. Nor is it necessary ; for even if these 
brethren were the children of Joseph by a former marriage, they were still 
in the home of Jesus, and we are only obliged to think of them as older, 
rather than younger, than He. Again, if they were His cousins, it is gen- 
erally admitted that their mother dwelt with the widowed Mary in her 
Nazarene home, and thus the children of the two families would grow up 
together. But I consider the great preponderance of evidence to be in favor 
of the position taken above, that they were brothers and sisters of Jesus. 



56 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

It was a common home, then, in which Jesus lived. 
He was not the only son, living alone, in unusual seclu- 
sion, with plenty of time to dream dreams, saved from 
labor by the awed reverence of parents of whose half 
worshipful care He was the sole object. He was the 
eldest of seven children. As such, His own family 
cares could not have been small. If Joseph, the father, 
died at some time previous to Christ's baptism, the 
care of the whole family devolved upon Him. This 
is a probable conjecture, as Joseph is never mentioned 
in the Gospels after the Ministry began, while the others 
repeatedly appear. Biographers of Jesus love to antici- 
pate the scenes of the Gospels and imagine the life of 
Jesus in these years as largely contemplative, much 
given to prayer, with lonely watchings and quiet perusal 
of the Scriptures. And we cannot for a moment believe 
that this period was prayerless, or that the later habit 
of His life was not forming already, so that He would 
often be found, when all the others had gone to rest, 
upon the hill-top above the village, keeping vigil 
beneath the stars. But doubtless, too, and quite as often, 
His prayer had to be snatched, as ours is, from the 
entanglements of the busiest life. The children play- 
ing in the shavings beneath His bench would mingle 
their cries of sport with His cry to Heaven. If the 
mother's health failed, His solicitude would not fail, 
nor His care be any less than that of the disciple John, 
to whom He committed her, when He could care for 
her no more on earth. 2 Discussions of business with 
Joseph, or of the distressing political situation with 

1 John xix. 25-27. 



THE NAZARENE FAMILY. 57 

neighbors, probably took as much time as reading the 
ancient scrolls of Chronicles and Kings. If He sat 
thinking a few moments with the tools laid aside, no 
doubt little Jude or Simon toddled up to ask Him to 
whittle out a boat for him. We note these things only 
to make this part of the life of Jesus real to us, as it 
was. Such a son, such a brother, we may be sure, 
neglected no loving duty of the little home in Nazareth 
merely because there was a larger home awaiting Him, 
when His larger work should be done. We may ques- 
tion whether that larger work would have been possible, 
so that He could cry at last " It is finished," if this 
life of the home, with all its petty incidents, had not 
been lovingly and faithfully lived by Him. How could 
He have taught about a Heavenly Father, if in the 
sight of His fellow-men He had proved unfaithful to 
His reputed father, and shown disrespect to the 
duties and privileges of fatherhood ? How could He 
have touched men's hearts with words of the "many 
mansions" in His Father's house, where they might be 
with Him, if He had shown in the only home that He 
had had on earth, that to be with Him was not to be 
desired ? And what were brotherhood with Him, if He 
had lived in unbrotherly carelessness or strife in the 
home of Nazareth ? Men do not so prepare to give their 
words weight, when in later life they take their place 
among men to teach them. We may rightly ask, there- 
fore, if this lovely, meek, service-bearing aspect of Jesus 
is not the one reasonably to be expected, if His mission 
to earth was what He declared it to be. Not even in 
the seclusion of the family had He come to rule like an 



53 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

Oriental despot ; not even there did a selfish withdrawal 
to meditation and mysticism make Him a useless clog 
upon the family's prosperity. In the Nazarene home 
He was Jesus, the Jesus presented to us with uniform 
consistency in the Gospels. 

But His own happiness in His home could not have 
been perfect. I have intimated that all the common 
experiences were His; and, if they were, of course He 
knew their outcome in anxiety, disappointment, sympa- 
thy, grief. But apart from these there was one great, 
overwhelming evil which finds express mention in the 
record: His brethren did not believe on Him. 1 Not 
even after His public work had begun and other men 
had come to Him, did His own brothers admit His claims 
and give Him their personal devotion. And yet they 
had seen more of Him than any others. From ten to 
a score of years they had been mature enough to take 
note of His holiness, and yet they did not believe. How 
many fathers and mothers have mourned because their 
children have not followed their own holy living ! How 
many brothers and sisters have spent years in patient 
striving, with the hope that their influence may lead 
younger members of the family to God ! And all the 
effort has seemed fruitless. Bitter questioning arises. 
Keenest introspection is compelled. Have I been true ? 
If faith and faithfulness are rewarded, then I have 
failed in my conceptions of truth, or have fallen short 
of attainment. The most bitter self-accusations often 
arise, because hope long deferred makes the heart sick. 
But — " neither did His brethren believe on Him." They 

1 John vii. 3-5. 



THE NAZARENE FAMILY. 59 

did not believe on Him even after the most emphatic 
confirmation by His wonderful public ministry had been 
given to the quiet holiness, that apparently had escaped 
their observation. The grief we feel, Jesus felt. Eesults 
have failed us ? They failed Him. His mother believed. 
Of Joseph the father we know nothing, but can hardly 
doubt that if he had realized and believed in the Lord- 
ship of Jesus, some word would have been said con- 
cerning his faith. But Jesus saw the youth of His 
brethren drifting on through the easily impressible years 
without any marked success in directing its course heav- 
enward. The soft clay doubtless felt His touch, and 
yielded unconsciously in lines of beauty beneath His 
moral power; but the statues were otherwise like the 
work of other artists, — they were not quickened, and 
love for the artist had not brought them living and 
ardent and believing to His side. And so we find a 
great sadness in that seemingly chance quotation of a 
proverb, 1 when His own countrymen, the people of the 
Nazarene district, said : " Whence hath this man this 
wisdom ? Is He not the carpenter's son ? Is not His 
mother called Mary ? And His brethren James, and 
Joseph, and Simon, and Judas ? And his sisters, are 
they not all with us ? " Then Jesus said with all the 
sadness, may we not say with more than the sadness, 
with which we would have said it: "A prophet is not 
without honor save in his own country and in his own 
house." But patience must have its perfect work. Faith 
must be tested sometimes beyond all possibility of sight. 
The time came when the brothers of the Lord believed. 
1 Matt. xiii. 57. 



60 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

He did not see it. Not one of them stood by Him at 
the crucifixion, to whom He might give their mother for 
future care. John, the beloved disciple, was nearer than 
any of them then, and would be more likely to sympa- 
thize with Mary than any one of her children. But 
that dark hour for this family was the darkest. Dawn 
was at hand. Immediately, as we turn the page, we 
read of the little company gathered for prayer in Jeru- 
salem : " These all continued with one accord in prayer 
and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother 
of Jesus, and with His brethren." 1 How obtuse, how 
hardened, how obstinate these brothers had been ! But 
the death and the resurrection of Jesus and His depart- 
ure to God had opened their eyes, and now they were 
His own. Soon we read of James and Jude so closely 
identified with the apostolic work that it is difficult to 
separate them from the eleven. And finally we have 
an Epistle of James, this James, the brother of the Lord ; 
and it is noteworthy that it is pre-eminently the epistle 
of "good works," as if now the early impressions of the 
Nazarene home had returned to him with their full 
force, and the righteousness of that perfect Brother was 
now appreciated. Luther might call this Epistle of 
James " an epistle of straw," because its emphasis upon 
practical holiness seemed to strike across the great Eefor- 
mation doctrine of justification by faith. But righteous- 
ness is not straw. It is the one imperishable foundation 
on which the superstructure may be safely built. It is 
the seed of imperishable life, sure to bear its fruits, 
though only after so long a time as elapsed between the 
1 Acts i. 14. 



THE NAZARENE FAMILY. 61 

quiet life in the Nazarene home and the writing of the 
General Epistle of James. Jude also wrote a general 
epistle, and says that he is the brother of James. Neither 
of these brothers in these letters claims to be brother 
of the Lord; they say they are His servants. The 
higher relationship, the spiritual fellowship into which 
they had entered, and possibly the humiliating remem- 
brance that their brotherhood in the flesh had been so 
faulty, probably led them to this silence. 

And this calls us to notice that Jesus always taught 
a higher claim even than that of the family. Does it 
seem reasonable that the family, established by God in 
nature, the foundation of society, the shrine of human 
affection, the chalice from which the sweetest draughts 
of happiness may be quaffed, should be made of sec- 
ondary importance by Jesus Christ ? But observe that 
He does not make it of secondary importance as com- 
pared with any other human relation or institution 
whatever. It is only when human ties are suffered to 
be stronger than the tie that should bind man to God, 
to right, to truth, that Jesus declares the supremacy 
of the latter. In His own case Jesus left His mother's 
home only when the hour had come for Him to enter 
openly upon His heavenly Father's business. The answer 
that He gave to His mother at Cana, when He rejected 
her authority but followed her suggestion, showed no 
lack of affection, but only that henceforth He was to 
regard the higher intimations of His mission, while it 
would be her part to follow and to serve Him. That 
Mary at once turned to the servants and bade them do 
His commands, showed that even in her heart there 



62 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

was no sting, no feeling of rejection, resulting from His 
words. So when at a later time l His mother and 
brothers could not understand His course and thought 
Him the victim of some madness, He did not repulse 
them rudely, or with any repudiation of the natural ties 
that bound them together. It was rather an exaltation 
of those ties, when He spoke of the higher bond exist- 
ing between those whose spiritual relationship found 
its origin in Himself as the Son of God. Just as father- 
hood in the flesh was selected as the fittest type of 
the fatherhood of God, so here Jesus argued from the 
less to the greater indeed, but in direct testimony, on 
that very account, to the sanctity of the love and inter- 
est shown by these members of His own family. Are 
these, as ye say, My mother and brethren ? Are they 
anxious, overburdened with responsibility about My 
course, willing to press forward here and own kinship 
with Me, whom ye oppose and reject? Is this human 
tie of love so strong ? Yerily greater even than this 
is the tie between Me and Mine in the spirit. Not 
these, but all who do the will of My Father in heaven, 
are My mother and brethren. And if a man made 
a vain excuse 2 that the burial of his father was a duty 
paramount to that of following Jesus, the claim could 
not be allowed only because it was a reversal of the 
proper order. However sacred might be the last tribute 
of respect to a dead father, it was less sacred than the 
service of the ever-living Father in heaven. In case of 
need, therefore, though that case must always be sad 
indeed, Jesus had come " to set a man at variance against 

* Matt. xii. 46-50. 2 Luke ix. 59. 



THE NAZARENE FAMILY. 63 

his father, and the daughter against her mother, and 
the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and to 
make a man's foes those of his own household." a Duty 
to God, to Christ as His Son, is to lead every other duty 
in its train. Whoso loves any one more than Christ 
is not worthy of Christ. Could He whose nature, whose 
love, whose sacrifice, whose purpose, were such as had 
been declared from the beginning, put His claim to the 
human heart below that of any other claim whatsoever ? 
It would have been beyond reason, and impossible. But 
in all this there is no degradation of the family. Kather 
by the very choice of this extreme case for the com- 
parison of duties, the family is exalted as that among 
all the relationships of men which comes nearest to the 
spiritual relationships of the heavenly world. 

It is quite in accord with this estimate of the family 
and the home, that Jesus would admit no cause for the 
breaking of the marriage-tie except that one which in 
nature itself must be destructive of love as well as purity, 
of the rights of children as well as parents. It is incon- 
ceivable that Jesus should have allowed any of the 
other causes for divorce which have found recognition 
in modern sentiment and law, Live together until you 
discover an incompatibility of temper ; or until one of 
you shall fall into some vice; or until cruel treatment 
shall cause one of you to sigh for release, or fear for the 
life ! If one of you becomes a drunkard, the other may 
be free! It was for human authority to devise such 
limitations of the marriage-tie as these. Christ gave 
no such law. His word was more exacting than the 

1 Matt. x. 35, 36. 



64 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

law of Moses. 1 " The Fharisees came to him and asked 
Him, tempting Him, Is it lawful for a man to put 
away his wife? And He answered and said unto them, 
What did Moses command you ? And they said, Moses 
suffered to write a bill of divorcement and to put her 
away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For 
the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. 
But from the beginning of creation God made them male 
and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father 
and mother and cleave unto his wife, and they twain 
shall be one flesh : so they are no more twain but one 
flesh. What therefore God hath joined together let 
not man put asunder." Any other law Jesus distinctly 
said had been given by Moses only on account of the 
hardness of heart of the people of that time. Would 
He not say of the laws of this time : They are but evi- 
dence of the hardness, the corruption, the selfishness, 
the sin of your hearts? According to Christ's word 
marriage is not to be broken for a fancy; the home 
is not to be destroyed for one evil or for many sorrows ; 
the holiness of fatherhood and motherhood is not to be 
abrogated because it is found that the first choice of 
each other by the parents was a mistake. Only one sin 
shall strike across this most sacred institution, — that 
which debases it most of all and brings upon it the most 
awful and incurable evil. For all other excuses there 
is but one word : " The hardness of your hearts." 

With all reverence we may answer the question : Why 
did not Jesus Himself make the family the medium of 
His own teaching, the scene of His own life, and sanc- 

i Mark x. 1-12 ; Matt. v. 31. 



THE NAZARENE FAMILY. 65 

tify by His own example the founding of a home? 
The objection to His service has been urged, that in 
these closest and dearest respects it was defective; and 
therefore our purest joys and also our keenest sorrows 
lie beyond the experience which He had and in which 
we need His perfect sympathy. The answer is most 
evident. In His life of sacrifice this great joy was also 
offered up upon the altar of the Father's will. No single 
human being could claim so much of His heart, His care, 
His time. To Him there was but one thought, — to do 
the will of Him that sent Him, and to finish His work. 
No home could shut Him in from men. No love could 
claim Him for a moment from the cry of need. No 
future disaster to a single soul must be made possible 
by the existence of any who owed their being to Him, 
and would therefore almost inevitably attract to them- 
selves something of the holy regard which is due only 
to Him. The adoration that has been given to His 
mother shows what would surely have occurred if He 
had founded a family and had perpetuated His name 
thus among men. Even we can see that at least for 
some, who were yet to believe on Him, such a course 
would have proved fatal. No, this joy was not for Him. 
This sacrifice, too, was the offering of His perfect love 
for mankind. He was the Bridegroom of His Church ; 2 
she was to be named His Bride, and to be called The 
Lamb's Wife. For her sake He would leave all others. 
No selfish thought could come to Him, no human com- 
fort could hedge His way. The necessity of being a 
bread-winner for others must not be laid upon Him 

l Matt ix. 15. 
5 



66 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

who was the Bread that came down from Heaven for 
the hunger of all the world. Not even this righteous 
love and duty of home could delay His foot for one 
moment from seeking the lost. 

But this sacrifice of the purest and greatest of our 
human privileges only shows to us the spirit that should 
fill us in our homes. The Epistle to the Ephesians 1 
details the duties of fathers, mothers, children, servants, 
masters, and shows the Christian spirit which transmutes 
into daily life the life that our Lord would have lived 
in one of our homes. The man who would make him- 
self a home with the thought that that home shall be 
only for his own selfish gratification and comfort, has 
none of the spirit of Christ. Self-sacrifice and not mere 
self-comfort, service and not mastery, love and not 
power, will make home what Christ would have it, — 
a true symbol of the Heavenly Father's house. How 
many men degrade their homes and banish happiness 
from them by making the wife a poor drudge, the vic- 
tim of tyranny as despotic as a Turk's; the children 
mere slaves, fearing his displeasure more than glad of 
his love ; the servants serving only from fear, with no 
example before them of heart-service, and with never a 
word of sympathy and kindness to cheer their lot ! A 
home like this cannot reasonably expect happiness. A 
man like Christ will be unselfish, gentle, courteous, chiv- 
alrous. He will reverence his wife ; he will honor the 
heart that has consented to share his fortunes ; he will 
save her toil if possible ; he will share with her his 
cares only because he thereby praises her wisdom and 

1 Eph. v. and vi. 



THE NAZARENE FAMILY. 67 

invites her faith and owns her right to a share in his 
affairs ; he will suffer no harm to come to her, though 
he die in her defence. " Love your wives " is the word 
that will cover his duty and make his home a heaven. 
And the woman who presides over a home will make 
the same spirit her delight. She may rightly expect 
the same courtierlike attention from her husband that 
she had before their marriage, and he will give it to her 
if he is a true man; and she will render to him the 
same devotion, for, if she has not been a silly fool, even 
before marriage she will not have allowed her lover's 
care for her to be a whit greater than hers for him. In 
the home they are still lovers, and the wife is gentle, 
gracious, winning, careful, faithful to each day's demands, 
true to each growing duty; and as a mother she will 
know that her children are like a trust from Heaven, 
to be made men and women of God through Christ, So 
the children will be like those who found the smile of 
Jesus and His outstretched arms inviting and lovely; 
they will learn of Him ; they will see His spirit in father 
and mother; they will be like them and Him; and in 
all courteous self-restraint and consideration for others, 
they will show as only children can show the Christlike 
life, for "of such is the kingdom of Heaven." 



THE TRIPLE TEMPTATION. 

THAT Jesus " was not able to sin," or " was able not 
to sin," were disputes of scholastic origin, and we 
need have little to do with them. But so much is clear, 
— that if His temptations were not real, if indeed He did 
not have the power to sin, then the record may as well 
not have been given us at all, since the tempted Saviour 
is thus at once removed in infinite degree from our 
human experience. If Jesus was not able to sin, the 
word " temptation " in the Gospel has no meaning for us. 
It is clear that the narrative of the temptation is not 
less, but somewhat more than history. There is a place 
named the wilderness of the Jordan ; but there are also 
swift flights to the pinnacle of the Temple, and to such 
a mountain height that it commands a view of all the 
nations of the earth. In other words, though doubtless 
Jesus was in the wilderness of the Jordan all the time, 
that place did not confine the assaults of evil upon Him, 
and the real scene of trial was where it always must be, — 
in the soul. The field of life is the battle-plain of the 
forces of good and evil ; and just as our own moral strug- 
gles are not to be bounded by flowing rivers or heights 
of mountains, so the temptation of Jesus was larger than 
could be measured by physical bounds, and more subtle 



THE TRIPLE TEMPTATION. 69 

than retreats of cave or acacia-grove on the banks of the 
Jordan could foil. Armed bodies may clash together on 
well-defined fields, mere topography aiding or hindering 
the strife ; but spirits fight under no such conditions, and 
the questions to be settled between right and wrong are 
greater than mere circumstance. 

And yet the place in which Jesus met the spirit of 
evil is not without significance. The graphic word of 
Saint Mark adds this touch to the picture: "And He 
was with the wild beasts." Far apart from human habi- 
tation, where no sympathy from His brother-man could 
offer help ; the cheering sound of human toil exchanged 
for the cry of the jackal, the laugh of childhood for the 
hideous howl of the hyena ; with no doctor or scribe to 
whom He might appeal for the right; where no quick 
glance at altar, or mystic veil, or pillared porch, or vine- 
wreathed Beautiful Gate could strengthen Him with 
sacred impulse and bid Him defy the evil one, — alone, 
He met the great test of character, and conquered. The 
battle of spirits is always solitary, if the extreme of test- 
ing is to be applied. The desert is the fit type of the 
scene of conflict. A thronged city doubtless has its 
thronging temptations, and its offers of gain, its flash and 
glitter, its falsities, its sensualities, its fratricidal greed, 
appeal to the soul with wonderful power. But history 
has proved that none of these realities possess the dev- 
ilish subtlety of imagination which in loneliness and idle- 
ness forms a world of its own, — a world crowded with 
sensual allurements. The peculiar holiness of monasti- 
cism found no safety in the dens of the desert. Isolation 
and introspection summoned more forms of evil than 



70 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

fasting and the scourge could drive away. Outraged 
nature had her revenge in worse mental and moral aber- 
rations than would have been the result even of a sur- 
feit of indulgence. To try not to think of a matter is 
the surest way to keep it in mind, and healthy and con- 
stant preoccupation is the only prevention of an evil 
course. For him who walks in the Spirit it will be easy 
not to fulfil the lusts of the flesh. And so even for the 
Christ, whose human nature was our own, the wilderness 
offered the largest opportunity for Satan to do his worst. 

"We find the story told in such a way as to invite 
special attention to the order of events. It is given in 
detail by Matthew and Luke. Mark devotes only two 
brief verses to it. In the first Gospel the order is, 
first the appeal to hunger ; then the attempt to destroy 
Him from the pinnacle of the Temple ; and last the 
presentation of the power and glory of the world. 
The Gospel of Luke reverses the order of the last 
two temptations. The order is not essential, and was 
suggested, it is likely, by the different points of view 
from which the writers regarded the event, Luke 
emphasizing the progressive force of the temptations 
upon Christ, and Matthew showing the increment 
of sin involved in the tempter's plan. Both writers 
agree in putting the temptation of the flesh first. This 
is natural. The physical instincts are imperious. From 
the very nature of things the body, weak servant of the 
soul, can endure no deprivation, no delay. Its demands 
must be satisfied first, and its satisfaction affords the 
readiest avenue for temptation. "Make bread of these 
stones " was an appeal to the hunger of the flesh, and 



THE TRIPLE TEMPTATION. 71 

the sin of yielding would have been distrust of God. 
Jesus would not take into His own hands the power 
of miracle, that merely His own satisfaction might be 
gained. The spirit that would pray and teach men so, 
" Give us this day our daily bread," would not deny 
itself by doubting God's care and hastening to turn 
these stones into food, a last and desperate resort in an 
apparent hour of need. To distrust God would be sin. 
But the next temptation was to a worse crime, — to tempt 
God, to have an over-trust, to dare the divine forbearance 
and appeal unduly to the divine interference ; and Jesus so 
denned the sin when He responded, " It is written, thou 
shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." Then the third 
temptation came, to the greatest sin of all, — the absolute 
forsaking of God for a reward: "Bow down and worship 
me, and I will give thee all these kingdoms and the 
glory of them." The increment of sin, therefore, is 
apparent in the order of the first Gospel : Distrust ; 
Presumption ; Forsaking : the lack of faith ; a presuming 
pride in faith ; betrayal and desertion, with sworn allegi- 
ance to God's foe. Luke, on the other hand, a physician, 
naturally emphasized the psychological force of the 
temptations : First, unquestionably, the appeal to the 
starving flesh ; next, the somewhat loftier and more 
subtle test of worldly ambition, the strong mental pull 
toward the glittering evil of the world ; and lastly, the 
spiritual pride, subtlest of all temptations, — to be exempt 
from mere human conditions, to be the special favorite 
of the heavenly world, to have cohorts of angels waiting 
to bear up the presuming heir of glory, who therefore 
can cast himself into any depth, if only the plunge 



72 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

is taken from the very Temple. This is the peculiar 
danger of spiritual exaltation ; and when the pure soul 
has reached its dizziest height of spiritual joy it often 
hears the quick Satanic whisper, "Cast thyself down." 
Whether, therefore, we follow the order of the one Evan- 
gelist or the other, we find the account of this typical 
temptation of Jesus most natural. 

The parallel is to be found in our common experience, 
and thus the temptation of Jesus is our own ; and yet 
the result was far different from the issue of our tempta- 
tions. We fall ; Jesus stood firm. In Him was no sin. 
If Jesus was revealing in His life the real nature of God, 
and if He was showing to man what God would be and 
do in the conditions of our life, then He could not fail 
to be tempted and to conquer the temptation. If He 
came to save, then how could He show God's power to 
foil evil so plainly, as by meeting the direst test with 
success ? Every condition of His ministry demanded 
such a trial as this in the wilderness of the Jordan, 
and that He should not be found wanting. If He was 
not what He claimed to be, success would have been 
inconceivable, and the moral failure would have been 
in accord with the lie of His whole being. If He was 
what He claimed to be, the narrative is consistent. 

Lastly, is it credible and to be taken literally, that 
Jesus was led up into the wilderness by the Spirit to be 
thus tempted ? Would it be a matter of God's holiness 
thus to present His Son to the vile companionship and 
the deadly danger of the prince of evil ? But there must 
be no half-way work with this champion of right. This 
Captain of salvation must not be ignorant of the worst 



THE TRIPLE TEMPTATION. 73 

wiles of the foe, from whom He is to deliver His own 
hosts of light. It will easily appear that He must suffer 
the utmost trial, if He is to be made perfect through 
suffering. Just because the Holy Spirit brooded over the 
Christ always to make Him perfect for His work, He 
must now lead Him where He could learn every condition 
of success. It must never be said of Jesus that He 
shunned and escaped any trial. Whatever may be spared 
other men, He must go to the very verge, stand 
undismayed upon the edge of the cliff, and fall not. 
Such necessity was laid upon Him from the very nature 
of His mission. Was it not, therefore, a work of holi- 
ness, a work for the Holy Spirit of God, to lead Him 
out into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil ? If 
it was the part of God's holiness to sacrifice Himself in 
the salvation of man and send forth His Son into contact 
with sin, it was equally the part of holiness to make the 
sacrifice thorough and complete. He will never win a 
campaign who consents only to skirmishes with the 
enemy, and runs away from every display of his full force 
upon the battlefield. It is in the desperate and supreme 
encounter that the genius of the conqueror proves 
itself ; and until the last great battle is fought and won, 
no one knows but the enemy's general may be the 
greater. It was not for Christ to shrink from the 
supreme danger. It was the part of the Holy Spirit, 
who ever watched His way, to bring Him to decisive con- 
flict with Satan and perfect His character for His work. 

The concluding words of the simple narrative are 
singularly significant. "The devil leaveth Him for a 
season," and "angels came and ministered unto Him." 



74 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

Xo man ever yet conquered temptation without some 
glad reprieve from struggle, and that joyous spiritual 
rebound from the strain of conflict, which is the most 
heavenly reward. He needs no bodily food who knows 
that He has been feasting upon the word of God, and 
feels within Himself the great uplift of the divine life. 
The flush of a great moral victory leaves a man in an 
ecstasy in which he cares little for bread. It may be 
that this moment is just the time when he should have 
bread, and when the physical part of life should serve 
the spiritual by calming its ecstasies and restoring the 
normal balance between the earthly and the heavenly. 
But the fact remains the same that at such moments 
the soul takes little note of physical requirements. The 
rewards are from above. Angels come and minister. 



VI. 

LIFE AMONG MEN. 

QUITE in accord with Christ's life in the home and 
His attitude with respect to the family, were His 
example and teachings with reference to the social life 
of men. His first public appearance after His baptism 
was at the wedding of a friend, perhaps a relative of His 
mother. He took occasion to show in the most marked 
way that so far from wishing His presence to be an 
obstacle to the festivity He desired to aid it. His first 
miracle was the fit initiative of all that followed. 

Jesus was not an ascetic. The ascetic ideal could 
have no reasonable place in the scheme of His life. 
John the Baptist had come in the garb of a prophet, and 
with the habits of life which were consistent with his 
calling. The people of his day were the more easily 
attracted by the wildness, the severity, the startling 
nature of his bearing. John's appearance and methods 
were quite in keeping with his desire to produce an 
immediate impression. John's purpose was only to 
awaken the nation, bring it to repentance, and prepare 
the coming of Jesus, who was to appear immediately. 
From the day of Christ's baptism Jesus was to increase 
and John was to decrease. 1 Christ's work was to be 

1 John iii. 3. 



76 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

of long duration, a work that would not end even with 
His death. It was to be age-long. John's work was of 
few days. He would have accomplished nothing if he 
had not been both ascetic and fanatic. He did not 
teach. He attempted to lay no broad foundations, as 
Jesus did. He came simply to introduce the Master. 
" He was not that Light." * It was not for him to light 
every man that cometh into the world. John's work 
was the work of a man ; Christ's work was the work of 
Jesus, who was neither man alone nor God alone, but 
" that Holy Thing," Immanuel, " God with us." John's 
work, then, was naturally a quick work, definite in its 
scope, reaching its end when Jesus began His ministry. 
The imperious Voice crying in the wilderness fell upon the 
ears of the nation like a peal of thunder from the cloudy 
skies of their sinfulness. The stern prophet, shunning 
the common life of men, clad in skins, eating the food 
of the desert, bore upon his very visage the revelation 
that the time had come for a crisis : and that crisis was 
the dawn of a new era ; that era began with Christ. 

Jesus, therefore, was as different from John as His 
mission was different from John's mission both in char- 
acter and time. Christ's work was to go on through 
ages of ages, and it was to be a work of life upon life. 
It was not merely one crisis. It was not a call to one 
duty ; it was to lay hold on all duties and mould char- 
acter after God's pattern. It was not the call of one 
generation to receive God's mercy; it was the declara- 
tion to the world and to all the generations of men of 
the truth of God. And this was to be done not merely 

1 John i. 8. 



LIFE AMONG MEN. 77 

by word of mouth, not by preaching and writing. It 
was to be done by character, by spirit, by life. When 
Jesus came, tfSgjgj it was impossible that He should come 
as an ascetic. He must be among men, where life 
would touch life ; He must be within call of every one 
who should need Him; He must be in view of the 
world, that all might be satisfied who would see Him ; 
He must be surrounded by multitudes to whom He 
could cry, " Come unto Me ; " 1 He must be in the 
midst of the world's labor, the world's sin, that He 
might show the way of rest. If this was His mission, 
then no joys of man, no sorrows, could be beyond His 
experience and sympathy. A gloomy ascetic, dwelling 
in a wilderness, secluded from others' joys and sorrows, 
could never have done the work of one who was appointed 
to show that God was not a far-off Being untouched by 
a feeling for man's infirmities, unsympathetic, and offer- 
ing no hope and no help. It was the mission of Jesus 
to show that these false ideas of God that had been pre- 
vailing in the world must be given up. He was to show 
in His own person that God so loved the world that He 
was forever in contact with it ; that He would not give 
up those who had wandered from Him. If Jesus had 
come as an ascetic, He would have shown exactly the 
contrary. Men would have been confirmed in their 
belief that God cared little for them, and that His own 
mysterious and eccentric holiness must be kept from 
contact with mankind. It was not reasonable, therefore, 
that Jesus should withdraw Himself from mankind. It 
was reasonable that He should dwell with them, mingle 

i Matt. xi. 28-30. 



S 



7S THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

with them in their homes, at their feasts, in their shops 
and streets, in their places of worship, knowing their 
joys and sorrows, holding before them always the great 
truth that God was like Him, as He was the express 
image of God to them, and saying always, "He who 
hath seen Me hath seen the Father." 1 

On the other hand, it was impossible that Jesus should 
be a fanatic. In John, in all the prophets of the old 
time, there was a mingling of asceticism and fanaticism. 
But Jesus could always await "His hour." There was 
no haste in His zeal, there was no violence in His 
methods. He did not strive nor cry. 2 Holy enthusiasm 
burned in every act of His life, but it never passed the 
bounds of wisdom. He had no lightning flash to use 
against those who were not of His way of thinking ; He 
would not set matters right by calling "twelve legions 
of angels" to carry out His will. God's patience and 
justice were to be exhibited, and not merely His power. 
Affections were to be won, hearts conquered, character 
formed ; and this could not be done in a moment. Fire, 
earthquake, wind, 3 might pass by and destroy, but they 
would have no power to construct. A still voice, per- 
suasive, long-pleading, teaching, was needed to build up 
faith and hope, and bring human life, as of old in the 
case of Elijah when in despair, to its normal condition 
in union with the life of God. The kingdom of heaven 
was not comparable to an explosion ; it was the leaven 
that by slow and hidden processes would change the 
character of the world. 

Moreover it cannot be forgotten that Jesus was not 

1 John xiv. 9. 2 Matt. xii. 19. 3 1 Kings xix. 12. 



LIFE AMONG MEN. 79 

merely revealing the nature of God to men, but He was 
also inducing men to become like God, to follow His 
ways, to be what God would be, if the manifestations 
of His moral character were to be confined to flesh. The 
effort of Jesus, as we have seen in former pages, was 
not only to bring God to the world, but to bring the 
world to God, and to make the world's life truly like 
the life of heaven. In a word, He was an example to 
man ; He was to show in His own life the product of 
perfect holiness in the flesh. Therefore He could be 
neither ascetic nor fanatic. Had He been the one or 
the other, the disciples would have been true only in 
following His footsteps. Christianity must have been 
either monasticism, or a great world-power with commis- 
sion to destroy and slay. The ascetic ideal would have 
relegated the church to the wilderness, wholly apart 
from the needs of men. The fanatic spirit would have 
endowed the church with the fire of Elijah, and we 
should have had only one more religion, of which the 
world had already seen too many, in which the chief 
power would have been persecution, and the ruling ele- 
ment fear. Imagine, if possible, what the world would be 
to-day, if the followers of Jesus had been led by His 
example either to the ascetic or to the fanatic goal ! 
Jesus lived in fact the only reasonable life. He " dwelt 
among men 1 and they beheld His glory," but it was 
the glory of one who was " full of grace and truth." 
Deceit and violence were not found in His mouth. 
No falsities of life were taught by Him. He gave 
the example of the common life of man redeemed 

1 John i. 14. 



80 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

from evil but not removed from any of its natural and 
ordinary surroundings. "He was made like unto His 
brethren," 1 so that it might be possible for them to 
follow Him, and in all the love and wisdom, which 
God would inspire within them, establish the realm of 
love and of right on earth. Thus we can follow His 
" example." 2 

We find, then, in the Gospels just that record of the 
life of Jesus that is most reasonable. It was a social 
life. He did not keep Himself separate from any class 
of men. There were no occasions from which He could 
not draw some opportunity for doing His work. Wed- 
dings and funerals called Him. The common street 
and the holy courts of the Temple were equally His 
resorts ; wayside wells, robber-infested defiles, fisher- 
men's boats, rocky tomb-haunts of madmen, were familiar 
to Him. Quiet homes where loving and near friendship 
could bless His retirement, and great feasts in His honor 
in the midst of promiscuous crowds and the glare and 
glitter of festivities, laid claim to Him alike, and found 
ready and courteous response. Sinners who were notori- 
ous, mere outcasts of society, came to Him with facility no 
less than that with which the Pharisees most renowned 
for righteousness could find Him. He would sit down 
and call little children to His arms and bless them, and 
He would go to the bed-sides of the sick and lift them 
up. He joined in the great religious services of the 
Temple, but did not hesitate also to teach His disciples 
to say without any ritual whatever, " Our Father, who 
art in Heaven." Wherever there were men ; where 

1 Heb. ii. 17. 2 Rom. xv. 5 ; 1 Pet. ii. 21, 22. 



LIFE AMONG MEN. 81 

one soul or many souls could be touched by His life, 
there He would be. The individual was not lost from 
His view ; the crowds never failed to excite His compas- 
sion. For mankind He lived. 

This was the cause of great perplexity to some ; it 
was made the occasion of obstinate opposition on the 
part of others. Criticism could as easily assail Him, as 
it assails His followers to-day, when their course runs 
counter to some ignorant person's prejudice, or some 
irreligious person's glad and carping hostility. There is 
even a hyper-religiosity, which might have complained 
as reasonably of Christ, as it does of His church, because 
the task of the world's salvation is not pursued with 
fanatical zeal. " These Christians have their pleasures ; 
they are engaged in the world's pursuits ; they are not 
without the emulations of the flesh ; they take no 
special care to remove themselves from the evils of 
their time; the woes of the world cry to them, but 
they give their aid only slowly and in a niggardly way ; 
they profess to have beliefs that are sublime, laying 
hold of eternity, and yet they live our commonplace 
life ; they hold the fate of millions in their hands, but 
they stop to eat and drink and be merry, while the 
millions go on to destruction." 

Such criticism was actually applied to Christ. There 
is only one exception, alas ! that differentiates the course 
of Jesus from that of His disciples. With Him, there 
was no sin. Wisdom was the restraint upon Him, 
where sin is often the power that cripples us. The 
sight of God's will that He had, was indeed very different 
from the selfishness that too often confines us to doing 



82 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

our own will. But we can only feel, as Christ did, 
that much of this criticism is wholly unwarranted and 
quite wicked. It is the spirit of the world that is unrea- 
sonable. Christ was reasonable. No course will please 
the foes of God. When John sent his disciples to ask 
Jesus if really He was the Messiah, Jesus returned a 
comforting, reassuring answer, and then He said to the 
multitude around Him, among whom stood many of His 
foes seeking to entrap Him : " This generation is like 
unto children sitting in the market-place and calling 
one to another and saying, We have piped unto you 
and ye have not danced ; we have mourned unto you, 
and ye have not wept. For John the Baptist came 
neither eating bread nor drinking wine ; and ye say, He 
hath a devil. The Son of man is come eating and drink- 
ing ; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man and a wine- 
bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners ! But wisdom 
is justified of all her children." * John had resorted to 
strange methods ; they had captured the attention of 
the people but for a short time, and the foes of God 
had thought him only a mad fanatic, not for their serious 
attention and following. Such a man as that could 
never do much as a reformer of the world. Christ came, 
pursuing the opposite course. The same objectors said : 
" He is a common man, even a rioter and glutton ; selfish 
ease is all He cares for ; the world is perishing, when He 
might save it by a word, if indeed He is the Son of God. 
Away with Him for an impostor ! " Christ's answer 
was simple : " Wisdom is justified of all her children." 
The world will not be satisfied any way ; but wisdom's 

1 Luke vii. 31-35. 



LIFE AMONG MEN. 83 

course justifies itself to all who are wise, to all who 
apprehend the real conditions under which truth and 
life can best come to their victory. Had Jesus been a 
mere fanatic He might have compelled instant attention 
and a very considerable following of the men of His 
day ; but His hold upon life, His power for the ages, 
would have failed. It were better to lose one generation 
and gain a hundred, if the problem had been reduced to 
such an issue. But it was not. The criticism of Christ's 
course was superficial, the perishable fruit of an unreason- 
ing hostility. The real wisdom of His course is evident 
to all men. He who came to reveal God to them, to 
show His mercy, to prove His Providence, to work out 
in flesh God's life, to mediate between God and man, 
atoning for sin and reconciling the world to God, could 
only accomplish the work by keeping in contact with 
man and living their own life in all respects. The only 
experience of man, which He could not know, was sin. 
Even temptation, as we have seen, had full power over 
His soul. The common life of mankind was His, and 
He brought God into it. Just as He taught, and was 
compelled to teach in the language of the people, slow 
and cumbrous and inadequate for One whose soul had 
been accustomed to the timeless flashes of intelligence 
of the heavenly world ; just as His illustrations must all 
be taken from the familiar objects, birds, flowers, water, 
bread, because any others would have obscured His 
meaning instead of throwing light upon it, — so His life, 
itself the great object-lesson, itself the great illustration 
of God, must be made up of all the commonplace events 
of human experience. If it had not been thus lived, it 



84 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

could not have been understood, and would have failed 
of its purpose. 

Note, also, that though His life was of such a charac- 
ter, its very commonplace nature was a new thing in the 
world, a greater marvel, a sign and wonder more start- 
ling than any the world had ever seen, inasmuch as its 
essential purpose was to bring God near to men. The 
fact that the world is to be saved by taking God into all 
its life, the joyful as well as the sorrowful parts of it, 
was a revelation. The various religions of the world had 
emphasized the separation of God from men. God had 
been relegated to the skies, to some realm beyond a brazen 
firmament, to some mountain-top inaccessible and cloud- 
covered, to recesses of groves, or hollow-resounding cav- 
erns, or the veiled shrines of temples. Eeligion was 
everywhere a gloomy thing, reeking with sacrifices of 
expiation, with priesthoods barring the way to the deity, 
and with the best thoughts of immortality clouded by the 
shadows of a Hades or Under-world. The better faiths 
like Buddhism had only made life hard. The religion 
that had come nearest to this idea of taking God into all 
its life was that of Greece ; but in this case the idea of 
the deity had become so grossly humanized that it had 
been fatal to morals : religion had degenerated on the 
one hand into sensuous observance, " gluttony and wine- 
bibbing " in very truth, gods feasting and drinking, lustful, 
and liars, while in practice they were invoked only with 
libations, and were expected to preside over every indul- 
gence ; and on the other hand the poetic sensibility that 
had peopled groves and streams, mountains and plains, 
cities and sea-shore with deities innumerable, ended in 



LIFE AMONG MEN. 85 

absolute pantheism, the confounding of God with nature. 
No religion had ever taught what Jesus showed in the 
Incarnation and in His life in the flesh, — to see God in 
everything, to take Him into the common everyday liv- 
ing, to be filled with His Spirit at all times, to feel sure 
of His constant care, His sympathy, and love, to feel free 
to appeal to Him and talk with Him as with a dear 
friend at one's side, and yet to keep God in thought as 
One God, that personal Being to whom all reverence and 
fealty are due. This was a new thing, and there were 
souls who were ready to welcome such a revelation of 
God. Men who love sin will not welcome God; they 
wish to keep God as far away as possible. Men who 
have wearied of sin, men who hate sin, who are longing 
after God, will welcome Him into their common lives. 
They will receive the revelation of Him in Jesus Christ. 
They who hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be 
filled, easily blessed because God Himself shall come and 
dwell in them as Jesus prophesied. With this prophecy 
and purpose the life of Christ coincided. He was man's 
Saviour not in extraordinary crises alone ; He was in the 
life of every common day, near to every man, showing 
God in ordinary human life, God as neighbor and friend. 
As recluse, or as fanatic, Jesus could not have taught the 
great lesson of the common life, in which men are to be 
godly, as He was, full of grace and truth. 

How great, how sweet, then, is our human life ! That 
God has entered into it, that Christ is not far from any 
man in any experience, it is good to know. To make our 
common lives holy, and our service to each other the ser- 
vice of heaven, is to have the same mind that was in 



86 THE SEASONABLE CHRIST. 

Christ. God is in our homes , — not enthroned in solitary- 
majesty on some far Olympus ; God is in our shops — 
not merely outshining the sun in the far and dazzling 
skies ; God is at our dinner-parties, though we need not 
set a plate for Him, but give Him only the chief place of 
honor in our hearts ; God is in our schools, and we are suf- 
fered to " think His thoughts after Him," while He opens 
before us the immeasurable realms of truth. There are no 
human conditions that are alien from God, except sin; 
for in Christ God was revealing to men that the infinite 
Sympathy is with them, and that Divine Love will not 
leave them out of its own life. 



VII. 

QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 

TT is more than interesting, it is of the very first impor- 
tance, to ask how Jesus met the great problems of 
His day, which forced themselves upon His attention 
and sympathy as a member of society. 

To a very extraordinary degree these problems must 
have appealed to Him, since He was not a mere private 
individual, one of a million, with only the ordinary capa- 
cities and the usual opportunities. His nature, His pur- 
pose, His claims, raised Him immeasurably above the 
crowd. He was singled out as the Lord, the Leader, the 
Saviour of life. To His sight would come views of human 
wrongs and misery that few other men could have ; to 
His ear would plead the timid sigh, which for all other 
ears the clash of the world's noises would smother; to 
His garment's hem the mere touch would bring its mute 
prayer, which to all others would seem only an unmean- 
ing part of the general bustle of the crowd ; to his heart 
the impurity of a condemned soul w^ould be a reason for 
condemning her accusers, 1 who seemed to all men to be 
pure, while the repentance of the confessed sinner would 
find forgiveness and love. He, as no man living, was 
aware of the world's woes; He, as no man who ever 

1 John viii. 1-11, margin. 



88 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

lived, made it the purpose and effort of His life to cure 
those woes ; and He, as no philanthropist the world has 
ever seen, laid the foundations for success in the great 
work of denning the rights of men and of securing them 
at last. It is for us to tread humbly in His footsteps, 
to apply broadly and fearlessly the principles that He 
taught, if we are to do our part as His disciples. 

In studying the condition of Palestine in the time of 
Jesus, we have the footsteps of many scholars to lead us. 
Ewald, Hausrath, Delitzsch, Schurer, Edersheim, and 
many others give us abundant knowledge of the times. 

The political condition is sufficiently well understood. 
Few countries of modern times are in the peculiar cir- 
cumstances of suffering which made the Jewish nation 
long ardently for its deliverer. No wonder that the people 
were ready to flock to the standard of any pretended 
deliverer. During hundreds of years the Jews had been 
a subject people. Foreign armies had met in battle upon 
their fields. The great patriot family of the Maccabees 
had led in revolt against the oppressor. Eebellion of less 
magnitude had occurred even during the boyhood of 
Jesus. But still the enemy triumphed. His armies were 
in the land ; his hirelings were in all the places of power ; 
his tribute was exacted with merciless rigor; his hand 
was heavy upon almost every interest of the Jew's life. 
There was no such thing as personal representation in the 
government ; there was no suffrage. The iron hand of a 
foreign despotism was over all the land, and the nation 
was a nation in slavery. 

Taxation was so burdensome that we can have little 
idea of it. The religious laws of the Jews themselves 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 89 

required nearly one third of their yearly income, 1 
the tenth, or tithe, which Christians often set as the 
Biblical limit for their gifts to the Lord being far too 
small. No Jew would have murmured against this 
heavy but self-imposed burden. But we must remem- 
ber this demand of his own religion on the Jew, when 
we go on to note the demands of the Eoman state upon 
him. The fact of any tax at all in addition to this 
religious obligation would seem almost unbearable from 
an economic point of view ; but when we add to this 
the teaching of the Kabbis that the very holiness of the 
land depended on its contributions to the Temple, it 
will be seen how the question of foreign taxation became 
a religious one, since the political revenue must also be 
gathered from the property consecrated by this Temple- 
gift to Jehovah. " Is it lawful to pay tribute unto Csesar 
or not " was not a mere captious question of the moment ; 
it was one of the burning religious questions of the times= 
The chief political taxes were two, — an income tax and 
a land tax. The income tax was one per cent; the land 
tax was paid by one tenth of all the grain and one fifth 
of the fruit and wine. But there were also extraordi- 
nary taxes, which might be levied very capriciously. 
For example, if the supply of corn in Italy ran short, the 
provinces, Syria among them, were called on to send 
additional supplies. Customs also were regularly levied, 
and tolls on bridges, roads, at town-gates, swelled the 
sum annually squeezed from the people. Even these 
items were not all, for the presence of garrisons in every 
town and of the hirelings of a corrupt provincial court, 

1 The Temple ; Edersheim ; page 334 sq. 



90 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

gave rise to all forms of bribery, and often of semi- 
legalized robbery. It made the matter worse, that in 
most cases foreigners were the collectors of the taxes. 
Despising the conquered people, regarding them as the 
legitimate spoil of the stronger conquerors, and with 
no power of appeal to deter them from the unjust exer- 
cise of their functions, these tax-gatherers, or " publicans," 
found many ways to oppress those who were already 
oppressed beyond endurance. One way was to loan 
money at large interest to tax-payers, who could not 
raise enough cash to pay their taxes. Thus the tax- 
payer became the debtor of the tax-collector as a private 
individual, and we can readily imagine how that snare 
would soon strangle the debtor altogether. The general 
system of collection, too, was as corrupt as could have 
been planned. The government did not collect its own 
taxes ; it farmed them out to men, who would guarantee 
and give bonds that their district should pay a certain 
amount, which was determined by an official census 
and valuation. Of course these farmers of the revenue 
got their pay from undue extortion. The government 
was satisfied with the prompt payment of the original 
sum agreed upon. There was no cause for investigation, 
if the collectors gathered fifty per cent too much, which 
went into their own pockets. Indeed, the whole plan 
was formed with the expectation that the farmers of 
the revenue would thus reward themselves. But this 
was not the limit of the wrong. We may think that 
combinations and trusts are of modern invention ; but 
the farmers of the revenues in Palestine formed com- 
panies, joining their capital to take up all large contracts, 



i 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 91 

instead of entering into competition with each other, 
They thus had the field to themselves. Private capital, 
private enterprise, native industry, were driven to the 
wall, and the field for extortion and robbery was undis- 
puted. Imagine the horror, therefore, with which the 
native Jew would be regarded who dared to assume the 
office of tax-gatherer ! He was at once a foe of his 
people,' a traitor to Israel. To be a Publican was to be 
guilty of the worst criminality. He was regarded as 
the fit companion of thieves, adulterers, murderers. He 
could not testify in a Jewish court. It was forbidden 
to eat with him. To take money from his hand even 
by way of making change was defiling. The Publicans 
as a class were thus the very scum of society, and Jesus 
never did a bolder thing than when He called a tax- 
gatherer to be an Apostle. 

In religion the state of affairs was somewhat better ; 
but even here the imperious domination of the pagan 
foreigner was felt. The Tower of Antonia overshadowed 
the courts of the Temple, and the garrison could look 
down into the sacred area. It is true, that the usual 
policy of the Eomans with conquered peoples was followed 
with the Jews, and they were allowed to preserve their 
own religion ; but the permission was like that given to 
a criminal to live, though under the restraints and disci- 
pline of a prison. For example, the religious taxes were 
protected, and special enactments decreed permission 
to the Temple to collect its moneys ; but the exactions 
of money for the state were so burdensome, as we have 
seen, that the Temple taxes were paid only at the expense 
of the greatest suffering. As special favors to the Jews 



92 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

synagogues were built in some of the towns and cities; 
and Augustus ordered a sacrifice to be offered at his 
expense in the Temple, and gave costly vessels for the 
service. But this toleration itself proved hateful to the 
Jews, who could ill brook permission to worship Jehovah 
from a pagan power, But this favor shown to religion 
was only superficial. In fact the faith of the Jew was 
always a mark for the contempt and insolence of the 
Eoman. The general disquiet, the smothered excite- 
ment, were not allayed by formal protection offered to 
religion. 

In speaking of taxation it was intimated that labor 
was at an entire disadvantage. Business was paralyzed, 
although the presence of many strangers created a 
demand for crops and all the necessaries of life. But 
the returns from agriculture and business were not 
secure. Confidence was shaken everywhere. Wages 
were due for debts before they were earned. It has 
been remarked by Edersheim how many of Christ's 
sayings presuppose a general state of bankruptcy as the 
only condition of the land with which His hearers were 
familiar : the treasure 1 hid in the field to keep it from 
robbers, or confiscation; the king 2 who would have 
sold his steward, with his wife and children and goods, 
for the payment of debts due him ; and that unmerciful 
steward's course, when he was forgiven his debt, in going 
out and taking his own debtor by the throat and casting 
him into prison till he should pay the whole ; the two 
debtors, 3 who had nothing to pay ; the unjust steward ; 4 

1 Matt. xiii. 44. 8 Luke vii. 41. 

2 Matt, xviii. 23. 4 Luke xvi. 1. 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 93 

the king who lacked money to carry on a war, 1 and the 
man who relinquished building a tower on the failure 
of his funds. Other instances will occur to the reader, 
in which such illustrations were used probably for the 
same reason that Jesus taught from lilies and birds and 
seeds, as things of the commonest observation. 

The rate of wages and their purchasing power can be 
seen from the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, 2 
who had to accept the arbitrary and unequal wages of 
the employer, and complained almost exactly as a mod- 
ern wage-earner would do at the apparent injustice of 
the bargain. The wage of each laborer was a denarius a 
day, or about seventeen cents. The price of a bushel of 
wheat at this time was almost exactly seventeen cents. 
In America, at the time of writing this page, wheat is 
quoted at ninety cents. The wage of these laborers would 
therefore be somewhere near ninety cents in America 
to-day, reckoning the purchasing power of the money. 
Other necessaries of life as they are now considered were 
such luxuries then as to be practically beyond the means 
of the laboring class. They ate little or no meat, 3 and 
lived almost altogether on bread and vegetables. Yet the 
ground of complaint in the parable was not meagreness 
of wage, for in fact the denarius was liberal payment for 
a day's work : it was only the unequal labor by which 
the sum was earned. But it can be seen readily that the 
condition of the wage-earner in the time of Jesus was 
inferior, absolutely considered, to that of the average 

1 Luke xiv. 31. 2 Matt. xx. 1-16. 

3 In the time of Diocletian the price of beef and mutton was fixed by 
law at about twelve cents a pound. 



94 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

wage-earner now, though as compared with the demand 
for the luxuries of life, or even as compared with the 
increase in what are now deemed necessaries, the laborers 
of Palestine had the advantage. They had little thought 
of demanding for themselves the greater comforts, the 
pleasures, and the higher culture of their wealthy 
employers. 

The contrasts, however, between the condition of the 
poor and the vast accumulations of the rich were nearly, 
if not quite, as great as now ; while the nefarious meth- 
ods by which these fortunes were gathered were far more 
common than at present. In the parable of Dives and 
Lazarus, no specific sin is charged to the former beyond 
excess of wealth and lack of mercy toward the beggar. 
To be a rich man was almost the same as being an extor- 
tioner, an oppressor; and the Lord's words about the 
difficulty of a rich man's entrance into the kingdom of 
heaven are thus explained. The salary of the President 
of the United States, a country of vast area, immense 
population, and inexhaustible resources, is $50,000. The 
annual income of Archelaus, ruling a province about 
as large as Massachusetts and Connecticut, was over 
$1,200,000; that of Herod Antipas was over $400,000; 
that of his brother Philip was $200,000; while Herod 
the Great, who was reigning at the time of Christ's birth, 
had about $3,400,000. Agrippa II. received annually 
$2,500,000. It does not help the matter that out of 
these sums the rulers paid a part of the expense of their 
armies, and built palaces and even cities. Even thus 
these vast sums were wrung from the people, not for their 
own benefit through good government, but for their 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 95 

oppression; and the wealth thus placed at the disposal 
of these despots was in no sense public money, but it 
was altogether the private fortune of the ruler. The 
sums enumerated must also be considered only approxi- 
mations, which may vary somewhat as the value of the 
Talent is reckoned ; but the comparison will not be greatly 
changed. 

We must remember that by the values which, as con- 
sidered above, gave the day's wage of the laborer in the 
vineyard a present purchasing-power of ninety cents, 
these princely incomes show a far wider gulf between 
the poor and the rich than we see to-day, while the far 
greater ostentation, and the more cruel disregard of the 
poorer man's comfort, and even life itself, gave occasion 
for deeper murmurs of revolt than are justified to-day. 
These men whom we have named were governors and 
princes, it is true; but private persons followed close 
after them in amassing great wealth, and records are 
extant of the enormous extravagance of noble Eomans, 
who would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a 
single banquet or piece of furniture. Not only in Eome 
but everywhere rich men of private station generally 
caught the infection from those in public life, and in the 
scramble for wealth took little heed of the ever-increasing 
" great gulf fixed " even in this world between the rich 
and the poor. We can hardly wonder at the feeling of 
the young man 1 who had great possessions, when the 
Lord met his ambition for holiness with the heroic pre- 
scription of giving to the poor all that he had. And we 
can see the instant necessity that entered into the pur- 
1 Matt. xix. 21. 



96 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

pose of Zaccheus, 1 when lie was converted, to give half 
his goods to the poor and restore fourfold to all whom he 
had defrauded. Possibly Zaccheus was the first Chris- 
tian rich man, first of the many who have since proved 
that Christ's word was true, and that with God it is pos- 
sible for a man to be rich and yet good. However it 
may have seemed to the disappointed young man of the 
Gospel, it has been seen in multitudes of instances that 
with God's help it is much easier to gain riches and yet be 
truly Christian than for a camel to go through the needle's 
eye. "With God all things," even this, "are possible." 

All these misfortunes seemed worse to the Jews 
because their own laws were singularly just and mer- 
ciful, of rare economic value, and if allowed to work 
without interruption would have proved adequate to 
relieve a large part of the wrong and suffering. In fact, 
we can hardly help believing that the easiest solution, 
the most just and moral solution, of the modern difficulties 
between labor and capital would be found by a careful 
study of the Mosaic code, with such modifications and 
definitions as the Rabbis had appended to it. A few 
instances out of the multitude that might be cited, will 
show this. 

The Eabbis appointed inspectors to go from market 
to market and inspect the quality of goods sold, and 
in many cases fix their prices. 2 All sorts of produce 
were sold at prices fixed by the community. The Talmu- 
dic laws against what now would be termed " a corner " 

1 Luke xix. 8. 

2 See Edersheim, Sketches of Jewish Social Life; also his Life and 
Times of Jesus the Messiah; and History of the Jewish Nation. 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 97 

in grain were very strict. Sixteen per cent was some- 
times permitted upon loans, but anything more was 
stamped as a fraud. "The dust of the balance" is a 
Jewish phrase, and law compelled a wholesale dealer 
to cleanse his measures once a month, and the retailer 
twice a week, while all weights were to be washed once 
a week. The seller was always to give an ounce over 
in every ten pounds of fluids and half an ounce in solids. 
Purchases of corn could not be concluded till the legal 
price had been fixed. 

It can be seen readily how, with such remedies within 
reach, the down-trodden and the oppressed of the people 
would find their hard lot all the harder to bear. In fact 
the complaints were loud and sometimes fierce. The 
old Jewish employers had the same troubles with their 
employees, that are demanding attention to-day. The 
differences between capital and labor were the same. 
There is extant an ancient warning : " Beware of eating 
fine bread and giving black bread to your workmen ; 
beware of sleeping on feathers while they sleep on straw ; 
remember that he who gets a Hebrew slave gets a Hebrew 
master." The law of competition in business and in 
labor was criticised even then. The Talmud permitted 
tradesmen to combine to work only one or two days in 
a week, so as to give enough employment to all work- 
men in a place ; and the Eabbinieal comment on the 
passage in Psalm 15, "He who doeth no evil to his 
neighbor," was, " This refers to one tradesman not inter- 
fering with the trade of another." 

If we may yet delay a moment before we see how 
Jesus bore Himself in the midst of these evils of His 

7 



9S THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

time, we may note briefly how the laws of marriage 
and divorce, and the relation of children and parents, 
had become of little force, so that a frightful condition 
of public morals had resulted. The Pharisees asked 
Christ, " Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife 
for every cause?" 1 and when He answered them and 
gave them His law, they said, "If that is so, a man 
would better not marry at all!" Their question and 
answer showed the fatal looseness of their opinions and 
practice. The very strictest moralist, even Shammai 
himself, whose school represented the highest standards, 
would not have adopted Christ's extreme position. 
Other schools, like those of Hillel and Akiba, were 
notoriously lax. In fact the prescribed conditions of 
the Mosaic code had been largely extended by the 
Rabbis, and now a wife could be divorced for such 
trivial offences as going about with loose hair, which 
was a sign of immodesty, for spinning in the street, for 
familiar talk with men, for ill-treating her husband's 
parents, for brawling, which was defined as " talking 
with her husband so loudly that the neighbors could 
hear her," for a general bad reputation, or for the 
discovery of any fraud before marriage. And a wife 
could procure a divorce if her husband were a leper, 
or affected with polypus, or engaged in any disagreeable 
trade, such as that of a tanner or coppersmith. Divorce 
was obligatory, if one of the parties had become a heretic, 
or ceased to profess Judaism. It can be seen very easily 
how a slight desire on the part of either husband or 
wife for separation would find a legal excuse in one or 
i Matt. xix. 3. 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 99 

more of these provisions. As for filial duties, the passage 
in Saint Matthew's Gospel (xv. 5) shows the relaxation 
that had come upon the severe Mosaic law, that punished 
dishonor to parents with death. " Why do ye trangress 
the commandment of God by your tradition ? For God 
commanded, saying, Honor thy father and mother ; and, 
He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death. 
But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his 
mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be 
profited by me, he shall not honor his father." That 
is to say, if a son was unwilling to help his parents in 
old age or sickness, he might make a vow of all that he 
possessed to God ; then it became wicked for him to give 
to his parents : whatsoever they might have profited 
by their son was now devoted to God, and though the 
son might not really pay a penny of this amount to God, 
yet it was consecrated. Even if his heart was touched 
with pity or remorse later, he was not allowed to with- 
draw his word Corban ; and so all obligation to his 
parents ceased. 

It is plain that the wrongs and abuses of the day were 
so great as to tempt a reformer to the most extreme 
measures and the most fanatical zeal. 

How, then, did Christ meet the demands upon Him 
as the Saviour of the world ? How did He face these 
and the other evils of His own time and land? And 
what relation did these evils bear in His ministry to the 
needs of the greater world ? 

It would be reasonable to expect that Jesus would be 
profoundly stirred by the immediate appeals of the 
immediate evils, but that He would also never lose from 



100 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

view the world-wide and age-long woes that must find 
correction and remedy in Himself. If He had cared for 
the local evil alone, He might have given all His atten- 
tion to local legislation by which to cure it. If on the 
other hand He had lost sight of the present disease of 
the body politic, and had been sunk in holy trance, seeing 
the dim ages filled with wrong, oppression, poverty, igno- 
rance, crime, disease, and death, He might have lived and 
taught wholly apart from his own times, and His word, 
unintelligible to the men about him, would have been 
luminous to the nineteenth century. In fact He pursued 
neither course to the exclusion of the other ; but while 
He touched the wounds of His own people, He showed 
the great principles of healing, which would save the 
world. He planted the seed: the growth of that seed 
would fill the whole earth at last. 

Probably the enunciation of the law of marriage is the 
only example of Christ's teaching in which He drew the 
exact line, which should apply to all cases. It was not 
unreasonable that He should make this exception, since 
the integrity of the family lies at the foundation of all 
the natural and formal society of man. To preserve this 
was to insure the essential safety of the structure in 
which human affections were to be like the cement bind- 
ing together the various stones of the building. When 
we erect a house, the placing of the stakes outlining the 
plan upon the ground is a matter of the greatest accu- 
racy, and the nature of the soil upon which the first 
stones are placed must be fully known. There must be 
no morass, no quicksand, no sliding clay. Define care- 
fully the first steps in the process ; the change afterward 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 101 

of minor parts of the plan will signify little : windows 
here, doors there, pinnacles up yonder, may all be placed 
as need requires and as the house grows ; but the lowest 
stones must remain the same. Nor is the single house a 
bad illustration of the position occupied by the family in 
the social body. What would a city be if no house in it 
had a stable foundation, if no dwelling had carefully 
marked bounds on which no other dwelling should tres- 
pass ? The sanctity of the home, of each home, makes 
the sanctity of society. It is not surprising, therefore, 
that Jesus should most carefully define a Christian law 
of marriage, preserve it by stricter bonds than Moses 
gave, and declare it to be the holy ordinance of God Him- 
self. It is not strange that this holiest of human rela- 
tionships should be chosen by Him as a token and symbol 
of His own union with His followers, so that He called 
the Church His Bride. 

But Jesus did not settle thus the exact course to be 
pursued in all matters in every land and every age by 
those who would be the subjects of His kingdom. The 
relation of men to each other in the State, in their busi- 
ness, even in their church, He indicated only in the most 
general way. He enunciated general principles, but left 
much freedom in particulars. No utterance of the Lord 
can be found in which the ideal of human government is 
represented either as republican or monarchical ; but there 
is much to show that the character that is built upon His 
precepts and pattern will be eminently capable of self- 
government. Jesus nowhere taught a definite theory of 
political economy ; but it is plain that many practices of 
His own day and of ours would melt away before His 



102 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

words, as the frost on the window melts beneath the 
noonday sun until a clear view is obtained. Even in the 
church He was content to leave its polity untouched and 
variable, only making sure that its coherence should be 
attained by unity of spirit and fealty to Himself. 

In the treatment of social problems He followed simi- 
lar methods. He steadily refused the assumption of 
worldly power, which more than once would have been 
easily gained for Him by the enthusiastic people, who 
would take Him and make Him a king. We have noted 
that His temptation forcibly to accomplish the welfare of 
the world might have been great. But force is not so 
strong as principle. Force is variable, transmissible ; 
principle is steadfast and universal. Force is only for a 
time ; principle is eternal. Force is limited to place ; 
principle knows no boundary lines. Or we may term 
principles spiritual forces, and say that Jesus simply laid 
hold upon eternal and universal spiritual forces; He 
appealed to the moral nature of men ; He laid before the 
intelligence of the world the great laws of ethical life, 
which He knew the experience of each soul, and in the 
end the experience of all people, would prove to be the 
only resource of welfare and happiness. While His own 
finger touched the eyes of the blind and opened them to 
the light of day; while His ear listened to the cry for 
help , while His lips spoke the definite and quick answer 
to the individual sinner and bade him believe in the for- 
giveness of God, — Jesus yet reached onward and spoke as 
never man spoke concerning life in general, and the great 
laws for its welfare. He saw the oppression of His nation 
by the Komans; but His foes could entrap Him in no 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 103 

treason, and He was content to say to his disciples : " Ben- 
der unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God 
the things that are God's," — knowing well that if the 
latter command were obeyed, the subjects of the heav- 
enly kingdom would care little about the oppression by 
Caesar's government. What was the protection of prop- 
erty, what even the security of life itself, to the man 
whose only wish should be that God's will might be done, 
and that the heavenly treasure of sonship to God might 
be his own ? Jesus saw the poor suffering and begging 
at the gate of the rich, and it is inconceivable that His 
heart did not bleed with their woes ; but while His words 
were unsparing against the pitiless rich, He sought no 
sudden political or economic revolution, but taught with 
dauntless faith the great principles by which in the end 
all greed and fraud and oppression would disappear. He 
knew and taught that the remedy lay in character, and 
that both the rich and the poor must be prepared for 
mutual helpfulness. 

On one occasion 1 an appeal was made to Him to divide 
an inheritance between two brothers, one of whom refused 
the other his rightful share. But He answered, " Man, 
who made me a judge, or a divider, over you ? " He 
refused to interfere in this specific case ; but He used the 
incident to suggest the great lesson against covetousness, 
and showed that a man's life consists not in the abun- 
dance of the things he possesses. It was an example of 
His general course. The principle at stake was the great 
matter, not the fortune. His work was not to divide or 
judge in one case, but to declare the law governing all 

1 Luke xii. 13. 



104 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

cases whatever. He bade, indeed, to give the cloak also, 
if one had been robbed of the coat ; and if you are com- 
pelled to go a mile by your oppressor, go with him twain. 
But Jesus never said a word to justify the violence that 
first seized the coat, or compelled the journey to the first 
milestone. Jesus never could have said, on the one hand, 
what one of the founders of the system of combinations 
in coal is reputed to have said : " Business means to get 
my competitor into a hole if I can, and then keep him 
there ; " nor, on the other hand, could Jesus have said 
what Lawrence Gronlund says in his " Exposition of Mod- 
ern Socialism," in illustration of the proposition that 
'•Every one who pockets gains without rendering an 
equivalent to society is a criminal," — "Every millionnaire 
is a criminal ; every one who amasses a hundred thousand 
dollars is a criminal ; every president of a company with 
nominal duties, if his salary is but a thousand dollars, is 
a criminal ; every one who loans his neighbor 8100, and 
exacts S106 in return, is a criminal." Jesus never resorted 
to unfeeling cruelty on the one hand, or to rabid nonsense 
on the other, to favor either rich or poor. The violence of 
oppression, the unrightful greed, the overwhelming ambi- 
tion, Jesus always rebuked, as He also rebuked the same 
violeDt, grasping, selfish retention of one's own rights. 
He Himself was a living example of the sacrifice of rights, 
— a sacrifice made from voluntary love, and not in recog- 
nition of any clamor that the world brought demanding 
it of Him. 

All experience has proved that such sacrifice lies at 
the foundation of human welfare. But the principle 
that governed Christ, reasonable to the core, is usually 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 105 

the last to find acceptance with men. Self-sacrifice is 
not a worldly characteristic. Men are always declar- 
ing their "rights." Capital demands its rights, labor 
demands its rights. But the world has gained pitiably 
little in these two thousand years by forcible attempts 
to secure these same rights, while we have learned what 
is perhaps the most emphatic lesson of the ages, — that 
concession, peaceful conference even with surrender of 
what we have honestly believed our own, arbitration 
with faithful adherence to its results, gracious if not 
rightful profit-sharing in business, is for the best welfare 
of all, because it really makes for righteousness. Jesus 
can never be quoted by the anarchist. As little can He 
be quoted by the man who has no care for his neighbor 
while he pulls down his own barns and builds larger, 
wherein to dispose his goods. We cannot conceive of 
Jesus playing the part of indifferentism in our day of 
the discussion of social questions ; but we can just as 
little conceive of Him as espousing one side or the other 
in any strife. Strife He would seek to allay. He would 
show the truth, but He would teach the way of love, 
and would seek to reconcile the divided. Above all 
He would not subvert wrong by violence. In no case 
did He appeal to force. " Come unto Me, for I am meek 
and lowly of heart " was His quiet word by which He 
would unite all hearts by centring them upon His own. 
The tax-gatherer of His day, worst oppressor of all, had 
only to come to Christ's heart, when his own was broken, 
and its selfishness and cruelty melted away, and the 
stream of love flowed out in restitution and charity. 
The Pharisee, who came to Him by night for fear of 



106 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

his fellows, learned that in his own heart, regenerate or 
not, lay the issues of life, and not in his official place. 
The fishermen were taught to place such estimate upon 
character and duty, that they need not care for caste 
and station. Outcasts of society were shown the way 
into a self-respect and a fellowship with God, which the 
richest and most respectable often failed to have. The 
discontented were not inflamed by incendiary speech 
until the fabric of society was in danger of destruction. 
Eather did Jesus insist upon lowliness of mind, esteem- 
ing other better than oneself, and being content with 
the things that we have. 

With all His knowledge of the evils of caste, He 
never sought to degrade the high to the low by any 
sudden and violent method ; nor did any of His teachings 
indicate that differences of condition must not of neces- 
sity follow differences of intrinsic worth in mind and 
character. He would have thought as soon of declaring 
that health must degenerate into disease without regard 
to the infraction of physical laws, and without reference 
to the relations of cause and effect. We nowhere hear 
Him bidding the poor to demand the riches that they 
have not earned, and that, if they thus possessed them, 
would be a damning snare to their souls. Never did 
He lay hand, either for Himself or others, on the accu- 
mulations of toil or inheritance. Never did He declare 
the right of the commune to such wealth. But we do 
see that He brought together the representatives of all 
classes in service to Himself and in self-sacrificing love 
to each other. His cradle was the centre of a common 
worship for magi and shepherds. His cross was the 



QUESTIONS OF THE TIME. 107 

common sacrifice for all who gathered about Him, — 
peasants and tradesmen and rich rulers. Joseph of 
Arimathaea, of wealth and station, became so one in 
heart with the fishermen, that he went and begged 
(strange beggar S) the body of Christ for burial. " Love 
one another ; " " seek not for yourselves ; " " your neighbor 
is every distressed one ; " " forgive ; " " judge not ; " " hate 
not ; " "I pray that they all may be one even as Thou, 
Father, art in me and I in Thee," — words like these were 
sure to enter into the life of this day of ours, as well as 
into the affairs of the men about Him, for they taught the 
universal brotherhood of all those who follow the Son 
of God and confess themselves to be the children of the 
one Father. The Old Testament had shown the indivi- 
dual in his relations to the family, the clan, the nation. 
Christ carried out the idea to its farthest issue in the 
brotherhood of the race. Still would the individual 
find very special bonds in the family, the tribe, and the 
nation. Jesus broke none of these bonds by violent 
and revolutionary act. He came not to destroy, but to 
fulfil. But in all these smaller circles of life the Chris- 
tian would be the better man, if henceforth he recognized 
that in God's world there were no " walls of partition " 
between man and man, or between God and man. That 
one magic word, Love, should be the word to conjure by, 
so that hearts and lives, classes and interests, should 
continually approach each other until the old prophecy 
of Isaiah should come true in all the earth : " They shall 
not hurt or destroy in all my Holy Mountain." J 

And we cannot conclude this part of our study con- 
1 Is. xi. 9. 



10S THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

ceruiug Christ in the social life of men without noting 
that He sought to purify society thus only by purifying 
each component part of it, each individual as the unit 
upon which the world's life is built. " Are there few 
that be saved ? " 1 Few or many, the question was pre- 
mature. " Strive thou to enter in at the strait gate." 2 
" Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom 
of God/' 3 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall 
see God." 4 Such words as these, such deeds as those by 
which He singled out individuals for the forgiveness of sins, 
never pronouncing absolution to a multitude ; such calls 
as came to Peter and Andrew, James and John, whereby 
thfe beginnings of the kingdom of God were made in the 
choice of a few attendant spirits that at the most did not 
exceed twelve, show that the vastness of the work which 
He had to do in the regeneration of society never diver- 
ted His attention from its thoroughness. The whole 
could be no better than its parts. The individual must 
be saved, if at last the kingdoms of this world were to 
become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ. 5 

" Luke xiii 23. 8 John iii. 3. 5 Rev. xi. 15. 

2 Ibid. xiii. 24. 4 Matt. v. 8. 



VIII. 

DOCTKINE. 

IF Jesus pursued the reasonable course in contact with 
the common life of men which we have seen, and 
which seems to be quite in accord with a purpose of God 
to reveal Himself in human life, we should reasonably 
look for a similar course in Christ's teaching. 

First, it is not surprising that we find Him adapting 
His language and illustrating His thought according to 
the intelligences of His time. Though His doctrine would 
be for all men in all time, yet the men who flocked around 
Him in Palestine were to be saved first ; to them and to 
future generations through them in natural course, the 
truth was to be revealed, and it could not have been 
revealed to them if the unhistoric course had been pur- 
sued, — if Jesus had spoken to the thought of the nine- 
teenth century instead of to the thought of His own 
countrymen and contemporaries. In terms of the time, 
with localisms and idioms that could be interpreted . by 
later generations, but needed no interpretation by His 
own, Jesus spoke as never man spoke. 

These adaptations to His own people did not prevent 
them from recognizing that His doctrine was different 
from any of their own religious schools in its authority 
and scope. They confessed at once that it rose above 



110 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

their own needs and the needs of their time. They saw 
that it reached beyond their sight into limitless future. 
But they saw, too, that it was meant for them, even if 
this was a Rabbi who had come from God. 1 It may seem 
needless to call attention to this primary simplicity and 
adaptation of the words of Christ. But there has been 
hardly any source of error more prolific than the inter- 
pretation that overlooks this very fact, and reduces to 
bald literalism or explains by modern parallelisms that 
rich Eastern coloring which the Gospels everywhere pre- 
sent. No Jew to whom Jesus spoke could think of the 
exact literalism with which theologians of the last cen- 
tury interpreted His awful words about the ever-burning 
fires of the Valley of Hinnom ; nor, on the other hand, 
could they explain their force away into the attenuated 
reasonings by which future punishment is made wholly 
remedial and restorative. His own generation, from the 
very figures employed, would think only of a spiritual 
counterpart to the destruction of all worthless material 
in the great garbage-heaps of the city offal, which were 
always burning with ever-ascending smoke even then 
visible from the place where they stood listening to His 
words. Baptism, as we have seen, could mean for the 
Jew of that day no literal washing and no magic regen- 
eration from the touch of the water on the flesh ; the 
deeper spiritual change, of which baptism was the age- 
long accepted symbol, was the inevitable lesson. And so 
it always was. Modern thought is to be guided by the 
terms of Christ's speech ; those terms are not to be pressed 
into the moulds of modern speculation. 

1 John iii. 2. 



DOCTRINE. Ill 

Christ's aim was to establish a new life in the indi- 
vidual and in society, and He was to do this by revealing 
God. His teachings, therefore, would hardly be those of 
a mere legalist, whose completed code would be at once 
perfect, its details admitting of no expansion, and its pro- 
visions taking no account of growth. The effort of Moses 
had been quite different. The " pattern in the Mount " 
had demanded that all things should be made and done 
in exact accord with itself ; but Christ's teaching was of 
a different sort from that which took account of bowls 
and candlesticks, knops and fringes, nor did he care to 
define in detail even the weightier questions of morals as 
judged by a legal standard. Judgment was to be removed 
from earth to heaven. " There is one that judge th," 1 and 
" he that rejecteth Me, and receiveth not my words, hath 
one that judgeth him ; the word that I spake, the same 
shall judge him in the last day." 2 Only by the standard 
of His own words and His own life would Jesus teach 
men to measure their lives. He was not founding a nation ; 
He was not defining rights and liberties; He was not 
legislating upon the possession and transfer of property ; 
He was not establishing even a religious ritual, the outer 
and formal lines by which men have formed, or thought 
it necessary to guard, their faith. These things were for 
Moses to care for and arrange. Christ was for all life. 
"The Life was the light of men." 3 What He taught 
could not be limited to details, which would surely in the 
onward sweep of human life need frequent changes in 
proportion as the details were multiplied. Principles 
govern details ; details do not and cannot under all cir- 

1 John viii. 50. 2 John xii. 48. 3 John i. 4. 



112 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

cumstances govern principles. If Jesus, then, were what 
He claimed to be, Immanuel, " God with us," seeking the 
world's salvation, the Gospels present only the reasonable 
method of instruction from His lips. Large declarations 
of truth ; germs that would grow, and like the sap of a 
tree throw their life out into the farthest ramifications of 
life, and be found adequate equally for the main stem 
and the minutest twig and leaf; searching definitions, 
laying bare the heart of morality ; declarations going to 
the very core of motive; the tables of Sinai not abrogated 
but replaced by the Sermon on the Mount, which revealed 
the very soul of the Mosaic commandments, — such were 
the sayings of Jesus, and such were the laws that no 
elaborate system of legal machinery would need to enforce, 
for they would be written upon the hearts and the minds 
of His followers by the Spirit of God. 

The relation of Christ's doctrine to the teaching of 
Moses and the Prophets is that of the wide sea to the 
waters of the land-locked bay, the boundless expanse 
of the air to the atmosphere set apart and bounded by 
the walls of a dwelling. If God had spoken by the 
mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began, 1 
and if He had never left any people without a witness 
of Himself, 2 when at last He spoke His Word in Flesh, 
He would certainly speak nothing contrary to His former 
revelations. Truth would still be truth, and it would 
not be truth merely because Jesus should declare it; 
but Jesus would speak it because it was truth. Some 
have thought to detract from the glory of Christ as the 
Eevealer of God, because others had uttered before His 

1 Luke i. 70. 2 Acts xiv. 17. 



DOCTRINE. 113 

day many sayings of similar import to His own. But 
the greater marvel, inexplicable indeed, it would have 
been, if He had contradicted truth by whomsoever 
uttered. When therefore Jesus taught, He did not 
contradict aught of the essentials of the Mosaic teach- 
ings. He removed the limits ; He led the people out of 
the dwelling into the open air ; the life that was at 
last in danger of being stifled was given the freedom of 
the universe. Mosaism in its externals was done away, 
but its spirit and life were exposed and quickened, its 
essential truths were emphasized, and the benefits of 
the " peculiar people " of God were given to the world. 
Moreover Christ's teaching was not philosophical, 
nor was it in the main dogmatic. It was principally 
ethical. His concern was to save from sin, by giving 
a true conception of God indeed, but such a conception 
as could be gained mainly from regarding Himself, 
who an Apostle afterward declared was "the express 
image of God's person " 1 and had in Him " all the 
fulness of the Godhead." 2 He entered into no such 
disquisition concerning His own nature, as men have 
sometimes thought themselves qualified to undertake. 
Even in the assertion of that nature, repeated and 
persistent, as we shall soon note, His words were 
the furthest from any metaphysical explanation of 
His unique being. And even in meeting the sins of 
the people, His teachings were simple and authorita- 
tive, never wasting a moment in useless words. When 
tempted to argument by hostile Scribes and Phari- 
sees, He leaped to their confutation in few sentences, 

i Heb. i. 3. * Col. ii. 9. 

8 



114 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

nor deigned to admit their hair-splitting casuistries to 
the tests of mere logic. " Forgiveness " was a word 
that always lay ready on His lips. " Sin no more " was 
the brief warning, " lest a worse evil come upon thee." 
His silence is a marvel to our longing hearts, when we 
dream of the heavenly world and wish for its bright 
mysteries. But He said that we might learn even from 
His silence ! " In My Father's house are many man- 
sions ; if it were not so I would have told you." a His 
mere silence was eloquent, a confirmation of their faith 
and hope. It was like saying that man's general longing 
for immortality was a proof of immortality, in the absence 
of any actual denial of it from God. But He never 
sought to explain heaven, or to enter into the question 
of its intelligences, the nature of spirit and of eternal 
life. Yet He did speak of them plainly. He declared 
His power over the spiritual world. The dead rose to 
life at His bidding, the grave opened to let Him go. 
He showed enough for His followers to develop ; but 
He left the development to the Spirit-guided souls of 
those who should come after Him. The very diversity 
of human opinion concerning the development of His 
doctrine, as one part of it is emphasized by one Christian 
and another by another, shows the simplicity and purity 
of His teaching ; as it is the white light of the sun that 
can be broken up into the varied colors of the spectrum 
with the widest variation and the greatest brilliancy for 
each prismatic color. 

There was one exception to the rule, which was specially 
in accord with His main purpose to redeem the world 

1 John xiv. 2. 






DOCTRINE. 115 

by revealing God. His assertions of His own nature 
were frequent and insistent; but it is to be noted that 
His assertions of His humanity were more frequent and 
emphatic than those of His divinity. That He was true 
Son of God, Only Begotten of the Father, He openly 
declared, and that He was not misunderstood is plain 
from the unrelenting persecution which the declaration 
induced. But far more frequently He called Himself 
the Son of Man. It was apparently His one effort to 
keep before the minds of men that He was human as 
well as divine ; that God had come in flesh ; that God 
was so near to every man that He had taken humanity 
upon Him, and that henceforth humanity was to be a 
part of His nature. That He was really man, was the 
great wonder, not that He was the Son of God. The 
people about Him, if they would not believe His words, 
would be compelled to believe Him from the works 
that He did, which were plainly beyond man's 
works. His claim to being the Son of God was proved 
by the divinity of His works. Happy, if word and 
work could always be so nearly identical! But that 
He was man, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, 
would be the hard thing to believe in view of His mani- 
fest deity, and it would become more difficult as time 
would go on, so that really the earliest great heresy would 
be upon this point, and Saint John would be obliged 
to write, 1 ere the first century closed, "Many deceivers 
are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus 
Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an 
anti-christ." It was left for a much later time to deny 

1 2 John i. 7 ; also 1 John i. 1-3 ; iv. 2. 



116 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

Christ's deity. It is no wonder, therefore, that Jesus 
repeatedly emphasized His participation in the nature 
of man, declaring Himself again and again The Son of 
Man, the great Representative of redeemed humanity, 
the ideal man, as He was the Kepresentative of God on 
earth. His doctrine in this respect was naturally con- 
sequent to the Incarnation itself, wholly consistent with 
its purpose and necessary to faith in every other teach- 
ing and event of Christ's life on earth. It was merely 
the doctrinal reassertion of the fact of Bethlehem, that 
" God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself." 
If this foundation was laid, the whole superstructure 
of religious truth would rise naturally upon it, just as the 
whole life of Christ would follow naturally and be at 
every point consistent with the birth of Jesus. To pro- 
duce God's life in men, to bring new heavens and new 
earth in the reformation of society, to redeem from evil 
and make good, — this was the purpose to be worked out. 
" The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which 
was lost." How many men would have been saved by 
hair-splitting discussion of philosophical schemes ? How 
many would have been saved to the loftiest possibilities 
of human righteousness by a propounding of a system of 
theology ? Christ went straight to the need. He taught 
the sinfulness of man indeed by going to each man, the 
inquiring ruler of the Jews as well as the penitent thief, 
for it was for such that He had come ; and He spoke such 
parables as the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son. He 
showed that God had the desire to forgive sin by pro- 
nouncing absolution Himself and initiating a new life of 
righteousness, as a fact that was patent and could not be 



DOCTRINE. 117 

gainsaid in the forgiven person. He declared this new 
life to be eternal, in no sense different in its essential 
character from the life of God and heaven. He who had 
not this life would suffer loss, and eternity would have 
nothing for him but the inevitable and natural results of 
such separation from God. The judgment of God upon 
the unrepentant sinner would be only according to the 
perfect character of God. It would not be the judgment 
of an unjust judge, nor the unreasoning hate and fiendish 
torment inflicted by a demon. God was what men saw 
in Christ ; " he who hath seen Me hath seen the Father," 2 
and Christ judged no man wrongly. "He knew what 
was in man." 2 So God would judge according to each 
man's works, 3 according to the light that he had had, with 
perfect justice. But with all His words about the eternal 
future, He never divorced it from these earthly years. 
The present was always the key to the situation. This 
life is the school of character, and the moment in which 
He stood face to face with the sinner was that man's 
opportunity to begin life anew. Instant conversion and 
instant righteousness were the paramount duty ; even the 
burial of a father could wait for that, and for that all other 
things, houses, lands, friends, must be left. 

But however He taught this change of being in a man, 
He gave but rare utterance to its philosophy. God's part 
of the great crisis was left unuttered, except when some 
man with overweening and unusual confidence needed to 
have the props of his false faith in himself cut away, that 
he might be launched upon the all-sustaining mercy of 
God, just as a ship upon the sea's margin cannot move an 
1 John xiv. 9. 2 John ii. 25. 3 Matt. xvi. 27. 



US THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

inch until the restraints on which it has stood erect — 
things of its own nature — shall be removed, when it 
shall leap into the waves and become a thing of life. To 
Xicodemus 1 Christ would talk of regeneration by the 
Spirit, beyond the control of man, lodged in the sove- 
reignty of God ; but to scores of others there was no word 
of this, for the poor souls knew well enough that they 
had no help in themselves. " In Him was Life, and the 
life was the light of men." 2 Life was greater even than 
truth. He declared Himself the Way, the Truth, and the 
Life. 3 Men needed to know God and so come to Him ; 
but Christ was the way to this knowledge. " How can 
we know the way ? " But He Himself was the Truth : 
" He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." He was 
the Truth, only because He was the Life of God, God 
incarnate, Truth produced in Life, wrought out in the 
common experience of man. Mathematics are as true in 
the dead moon as upon the warm and living earth ; but 
transmuted into life here the great truths of science find 
their best meaning and their highest use. A lifeless uni- 
verse must still be the work of God, showing the marvel- 
lous combination of laws by which alone it can subsist ; 
but life is the supreme end of law, and so even a dust- 
speck in the universe like our little globe may be digni- 
fied beyond the myriad suns, if they have not life, but 
only contribute to the support and delight of life in the 
human race. No mere mass of matter; no universal 
combination of material bodies, can so speak of God as 
the cry of an infant, or the reasoning word of a man, or 
the mutual love of human hearts. Therefore did Jesus 

1 John iii. 2 John i. 4. 3 John xiy. 6. 



DOCTRINE. 119 

live, and therefore His words were all of life. To bring 
life to God's life was the whole purpose of His life and 
doctrine. Every word revealed man to himself, revealed 
God to man, showed the great gulf between them, bridged 
that gulf with the divine love, sought to lead the trem- 
bling sinner out upon that love. Every word taught us 
that the issues of life are in ourselves, as we shall turn 
toward God or not. The old, age-long questions were thus 
answered, and men found satisfaction from Him who spoke 
as never man spoke, from Him who had " the words of 
Eternal Life." 

One thing more we must note, that Jesus distinctly 
recognized that further revelation, or at least develop- 
ment of doctrine, would be given to His disciples at a 
later time, when they should be better prepared for it. 
He said plainly : " I have yet many things to say unto 
you, but ye cannot bear them now." 1 It was in accord 
with His constant care for them, for it is recorded that 
early in His ministry He "spake the word unto them 
with many such parables, as they were able to hear it." 2 
That He intended to withhold certain phases of truth 
and the development of His doctrine until His death 
and resurrection had led His disciples on to a higher 
point in their education, is wholly natural. How could 
they have received Saint Paul's doctrine of the atonement 
before Christ's death had occurred, when the full and 
perfect determination of that doctrine itself is yet a 
point of disagreement among devout Christians, who 
have made Saint Paul's words the study of a lifetime ? 
How could they have gloried in the resurrection of Jesus, 

1 John xvi. 12. 2 Mark iv. 33. 



120 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

giving it its true place as the sign and promise of their 
own future life, before they saw it as a fact, and by 
renewed intercourse with Him knew that the same Lord 
who had died on the cross, had risen from the dead and 
been " justified " by that glory by His Father ? His 
method in revealing truth was exactly that which God 
had always pursued with the people of Israel and with 
the world. It was that of a kind and wise teacher, who 
educated truly, who led forth the understanding of the 
pupil until it could grasp the meaning of events. An 
unwise teacher of abundant knowledge might have 
forced a certain amount of learning into the minds of 
the Jews, and Christ might have done it with His dis- 
ciples, giving them a parrot-knowledge of events yet to 
come, and of their profound significance, so that they 
could have recited, like an unwitting school-boy, the 
doctrines of a later time ; but that would not have been 
wise teaching, as all the history of pedagogics has shown. 
It would not have strengthened the minds, enlarged 
the spiritual perceptions, given facility in self-effort, and 
led out the character of the disciples. The weary, life- 
less, machine-like muttering of the Eabbinical laws 
might be good enough for the disciples of the Jewish 
schools. But Christ would not teach in that way. He 
was too wise, too good, to dwarf and maim the intellects 
of His followers by any such process. "They were to 
be led into all truth," 1 indeed, but they could have been 
led into very little truth, if the free and natural expan- 
sion of their own minds and hearts had not been patiently 
fostered. 

1 John xvi. 13. 



DOCTRINE. 121 

In this connection Christ's charity in doctrine was 
forever a rebuke and an example to the hatreds of 
polemics in the field of Christian creeds. He was 
patient to the utmost with the Twelve, who understood 
so little of what He taught them, and was content to lay 
the foundations of the future developments of faith. 
But it was not only with His immediate followers that 
His loving forbearance welcomed a mere partial acquisi- 
tion of truth. There came to Him one day the tidings 
that a certain man was casting out devils and doing 
many wonderful works in His name, and yet the man 
did not join himself to the disciples. 1 They forbade 
him on that account. But Jesus said, Forbid him not, 
for there is no man who shall do a miracle in My name 
who can lightly speak evil of Me. And He added that 
if one should only give a cup of cold water to them in 
His name it would be a deed for reward rather than 
blame. " For he who is not against us is on our part." 
What Christ would answer now to the strife of tongues 
waged by the adherents of opposing creeds, may well 
be imagined. What if He should still rebuke the 
whole odium theologicum of His followers by this one 
word, as in the old time : " If this or that creed is giving 
to the thirsty a single cup of cold water in My name, 
forbid it not ! " It seems as if He was content to let the 
one correct article of this wonder-worker's creed, a 
belief in His name as a sign of power for good, cancel 
all the errors of it in His judgment of the case, sure 
that that one truth would in reality cancel all error in 
the end. Men may refuse, and perhaps must refuse, 
to go counter to their conscience in acknowledging 

1 Mark ix. 38. 



122 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

fellowship with any error; but in the general lack of 
perfect knowledge, it were well that the Master's spirit of 
patience and welcome to all that is good should be re- 
membered. " He who is not against us, is for us." It is 
a better saying than the bitter assertion that He who 
is not of our own little company must be forbidden to 
use the name of Christ at all. Jesus made no conces- 
sion of His own faith to this mistaken man ; but He 
approved instantly of the use of what truth the man 
did have, and He lent Him the power of His name 
for the blessing of mankind, though every other article 
of the man's faith was wrong. There is a weakness of 
faith that can tolerate nothing outside of its own strong- 
hold. There is a strength of faith that can trust itself 
to walk with a foe, secure from attack, and knowing that 
divine strength and beauty shall overcome human error. 
But Jesus went even farther than this. He would not 
recognize the man who walked not with them as His 
enemy. If he was blessing men through the power of 
Christ's name, he was Christ's friend. 

But with His charity Jesus did not lower the standard 
of His doctrine to fit the moral condition of His hearers. 
Every word presented an ideal. It may seem that the 
Sermon on the Mount presents a standard of morals 
impossible of attainment; but Jesus could have set no 
standard but the highest, if His word, in the least as well 
as the greatest, was to be consistent with His life, and if 
both were to be the exposition of God to men. If Jesus 
was to lead men back to God, He could not have gone 
before them only a part of the way, or given them direc- 
tions that would have failed to cover their whole journey. 
As the Son of God, as the Son of Man, knowing God and 



DOCTRINE. 123 

saving man, He could give no command other than that 
men should be perfect, even as the Father in heaven is 
perfect. 1 Any other command would have been practi- 
cally a command to sin. Moral perfection must be set 
before man as the goal of his desire and effort, if Christ 
was what He claimed to be and what the world needed. 
Had He not given the command to ideal holiness, He 
would have sinned Himself as leading men astray; He 
would have been the deceiver that unbelievers have 
sometimes declared Him to be. But as His doctrine 
stands, it fails not in one jot or tittle of absolute Tight- 
ness ; there is not a shade of discrepance between it and 
His nature, His character, His mission. If it seems to 
any man impossible of attainment, that very dazzling 
whiteness of it, even if we reach it not ourselves, shall 
be its own best testimony to the purity and fulness of 
the everlasting streams that come down to us for our 
refreshing. Not yet, perhaps, may man reach the foun- 
tain-head of the water of life; but his faith in Christ 
may give him many draughts, which shall quicken his 
life and sustain it until he shall be pure and so see God. 
There is the name of no other teacher given among men, 
whereby they must be saved. If we go not to Christ for 
knowledge of God and heaven, to whom shall we go ? It 
is the question that Saint Peter asked, and it was his 
answer to the Lord's pathetic appeal to the Twelve, when 
all others seemed deserting Him. "Will ye also go 
away ? " 2 " Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the 
words of eternal life, and we believe and are sure that 
Thou art that Christ, the Son of the Living God." 

1 Matt. v. 48. 2 John vi. 68. 



IX. 



CHRIST IN MIRACLE. 






TT was as natural for Christ to do miracles, as it teas 
for Rim to breathe. If the Incarnation is credible, 
as we have seen, then He must show some of the special 
attributes of Deity as well as those of Humanity. It 
was not necessary that all of the attributes of Deity 
should appear, and we have already seen how He made 
Himself poor in such glory for the sake of those whom 
He came to serve. He surrendered voluntarily omni- 
science, for it was not necessary that He should know all 
things at all times of His earthly career ; and yet He 
often knew more than men could know, if the occasion 
demanded and the perfection of His service made it 
necessary. In like manner His omnipotence was in 
abeyance, and yet He often did greater works than any 
man could do, when the occasion required. He was Son 
of God and Son of Man, and His mission would have 
failed if He had not lived the common life of man on 
the one hand, yet that life lifted to an ideal ; and on the 
other the common life of God, yet that life subordinated 
and shorn of some of its infinite glory, that it might be 
manifested in the flesh. Miracle was not the only phase 
of the divine glory that appeared in Jesus. His love 
was above that of men, and His knowledge and wisdom 



CHRIST IN MIRACLE. 125 

were not limited to the ordinary range of human obser- 
vation. His word of forgiveness was itself a word of 
power, that revealed God every time that He spoke it 
with authority. We find great force in the saying of 
the Scribes : " Why doth this man thus speak ? He 
blasphemeth ! Who can forgive sins but God only ? " 1 
It was one of many instances in which their hatred bore 
unconscious testimony to Christ's truth. Again there 
are many hints as to the personal appearance of Jesus, 
that indicate a certain majesty of demeanor before which 
men feared greatly, and either shrunk from Him or were 
irresistibly drawn to Him, as His mien was one of anger, 
or sorrow, or winning love. Surely it is not strange 
that among all these indications of the heavenly nature 
in Him should be found also traces of the divine power 
over nature, proving Him as superior to the material 
universe as the Creator of it. We repeat, that if it was 
natural to Him to eat and drink and sleep, to think and 
talk, to be a manifest sharer in the human life about 
Him, it was just as natural for Him to be a manifest 
sharer in the life of God, whether by the exhibition of 
power or any other attribute, which the success of His 
mission demanded. It was as natural for Him to do 
miracles as it was to breathe. 

But an objector may ask, why the miracles of Christ 
indicate His deity any more than those which are 
ascribed to Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, show 
the deity of those men. We answer that if the miracles 
of Christ be considered alone, they do not prove His 
deity, although they do have an evidential value beyond 
1 Mark ii. 7. 



126 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

that of all other miracles, as we shall point out later. 
If compared with the miracles done by Moses and the 
others, their evidential character is exactly the same so 
far as it affords an indorsement, easily legible by all who 
saw it, of the claims which were made by those prophets 
and messengers of God, They did not claim to be more 
than man, but Jesus did claim to be the Son of God. 
Miracle in the hands of Moses was good for nothing 
except to substantiate to Pharaoh that Moses spoke as 
the accredited representative of God. It was so, too, 
when the same lesson must be taught to the Israelites, 
for whom it was vastly more important that they should 
not be rebellious against Moses than that their physical 
desires should be satisfied by water out of the flinty 
rock. Moses proved to the men of His day that He had 
authority from God, by giving them an object-lesson of 
God's peculiar prerogative resident in his hands for 
that purpose. Christ showed the men of His day the 
same thing in the same way, only His claim for Himself 
was larger than the claim of Moses ; His claim was that 
He was Son of God as well as Son of Man. It was 
inconceivable that God would approve a deceiver by the 
gift of His own seal : He would not by the writing of 
His own hand indorse a fraudulent claim, whether it was 
made by Moses or by Christ. If the water of the Nile 
obeyed Moses, or the water of Gennessereth obeyed 
Christ, the same thing was shown to all who saw : not 
necessarily either that Christ or Moses was divine ; but 
that the divine favor was a pledge of their truth and that 
they were what they claimed to be as servants of God. 
Thus indirectly would be proved the divinity of Jesus, for 



CHRIST IN MIRACLE. 127 

He claimed it ; while the very opposite would be proved for 
Moses, namely, — that he was not divine, for he claimed 
only to be the human leader of Israel. 

But there is an evidential value of miracles as done 
by Christ, which reaches over to the spiritual realm, and 
by virtue of the visible power in them leads the faith 
onward to an acceptance of the same authority in the 
invisible realms of the soul. A remarkable instance, 
in which this is the main force of Christ's deed and 
argument, is recorded by Saint Matthew in the ninth 
chapter : — 

"And, behold, they brought unto Him a man sick of the 
palsy, lying on a bed : and Jesus seeing their faith said unto 
the sick of the palsy, Son, be of good cheer ; thy sins be for- 
given thee. And behold certain of the Scribes said within 
themselves, This man blasphemeth. And Jesus knowing their 
thoughts said : Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts 1 For 
whether is easier to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee ; or to say, 
Arise and walk 1 But that ye may know that the Son of man 
hath power on earth to forgive sins (then said He to the sick 
of the palsy), Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thine own 
house. And he arose and departed to his own house." 

Now Christ's own course of thought is here perfectly 
plain, and it is clear that His hearers understood Him. 
If they had given any answer to His question : Whether 
is easier to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee ; or to say, 
Arise and walk ? they would have answered as we should : 
It is easier to say, Thy sins are forgiven, for no man can 
see whether they are forgiven or not ; the saying cannot 
be put to proof ; it may or may not be true, and you 
venture little in saying it. But if you say to this palsied 



128 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

man, Arise and walk, we can see at once whether your 
word has any power or not. Plainly it is much harder 
to command him to walk than to promise him forgive- 
ness. " Very well then," was the Lord's answer in effect, 
" I will do the harder thing, and to your own eyes I 
will prove this authority and give you the test that you 
can see and will accept." So He healed the man. They 
were silenced. His miracle in the realm of their vision 
had cast its power over into the realms where their 
vision was lost, and they had no excuse for refusing to 
believe that the man's sins were forgiven. The charge 
of blasphemy had fallen to the ground. And this was 
a constant force of miracle. It was an object-lesson to 
the people. It secured faith in the immediate and 
visible, that it might lead belief on to the invisible. He 
who was thus the ruler of destiny in the physical world 
could well be trusted as the arbiter of the soul's destiny 
in the heavenly world. 

But beyond all these considerations to show the nature 
and place of miracles in the economy of redemption, the 
following are to be added as of special force in this con- 
nection. -They are well stated by Charles Gore in the 
Bampton Lectures for 1891, "The Incarnation of the 
Son of God," though the view in question is ancient. 

First, miracle indicates Personality. Mind and will 
and power behind Nature are shown. Orderly arrange- 
ment and unbroken continuity would certainly tend to 
establish the wrong belief that matter and its phenomena 
are eternal, the universe a machine self-existent and quite 
independent of personal care or interference. Or if the 
creation of the universe by Omnipotence were granted, 



CHRIST IN MIRACLE. 129 

all the evidence of uninterrupted law would be to lead 
men — some men if not all — to the conclusion that God's 
work was completed in creation, and that, practically at 
least, He had withdrawn into inaccessible realms. Athe- 
ism on the one hand, pantheism on the other, would be 
the result. We do not say that such conclusions would 
be logically necessary ; we do not believe that they would 
be : but they would be almost certain to follow, and as a 
matter of fact the world had gone far in those directions. 
Men must be taught " that God is, and that He is the 
rewarder of all those who diligently seek Him." * That 
God is, that He is greater than His creation, that He may 
still create and legislate, revealing His mind and declar- 
ing purpose, could be shown with no more emphasis than 
by bending laws that were inflexible to all other minds 
and wills to His own Will ; by causing these otherwise 
invariable arrangements to vary under the visible guid- 
ance of His hand. Christ must prove the personality of 
God before He could demand fealty and love for God. " If 
God is personal, if His being is better expressed in human 
will and character than in mechanical motion and uncon- 
scious life, miracles with adequate cause are neither 
impossible nor unnatural. It is blind instinct which 
works on in monotonous uniformity where conditions are 
exceptional. It is rational character which from time to 
time will violate uniformity in the interest of rational 
consistency." 2 And this is all that we plead for here. 
If Christ was to reveal personality, if the Incarnation was 
to show God as present and real in the affairs of men, 
then rational consistency required some form of miracle 

1 Heb. xi. 6. 2 Gore, p. 51. 



130 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

done by Christ's hand, which should be in accord with 
His own nature and work. 

But a second necessity for miracle appears in the fact 
that God was not only a living, acting person, but also 
one who loved, and whose love was no less a law of His 
being, and a fount of His action, than any other charac- 
teristic of deity. There is no forgiveness in Nature. If 
Nature be accepted as the only, or the complete expres- 
sion of the Creator's character, then God must be deemed 
inflexible, — hard and stern and unforgiving. Whoever 
contracts a debt to Nature, must pay the uttermost far- 
thing. But Christ knew a law of God that went beyond 
this inflexibility, and it was especially to show this that 
He came into the world. " God so loved the world that 
He gave His Son." The grace that Nature knew nothing 
of, must be shown as greater than any law of physics. 
Love combined with wisdom saw the opportunity when 
the need appeared, and Christ came to show that God 
was not the inexorable and far-off Being that men had 
been led to believe in, but that Infinite Love could com- 
mand law and make it work for men. 

It is quite in accord with these thoughts that Jesus 
never wrought any miracles for His own benefit, and 
often called openly upon His Father, as within hearing 
and actually supplying the power, before He proceeded to 
any mighty work. He did this expressly for the sake of 
the witnesses, who needed to be taught these great les- 
sons of God. As He said in His discourse recorded by 
Saint John (xii. 30) : " This voice came not for My sake, 
but for your sakes," so also at the tomb of Lazarus He 
prayed, " Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me, 



CHRIST IN MIRACLE. 131 

and I knew that Thou hearest Me always : but because 
of the people which stand by I said it, that they may 
believe that Thou hast sent Me." 1 Christ's mighty works 
were always done in the service of men, were never self- 
ish, but always the works of love and helpfulness, and 
always indicated that it was no mere wish of His own 
even thus to act, but that God's will and God's love were 
thus shown to men. Back of all the observed course of 
nature, overruling its inexorable forces, teaching lessons 
that it could never teach, proving that a higher power 
than mechanical law, or even blind but life-endowed 
instinct, is at work in the affairs of men, God's personality 
and God's love thrust themselves into view through the 
life and works of Jesus. The veil of material things that 
hides the Holy Place of God's dwelling was more than 
once rent in twain ; or rather, once for all in the Incar- 
nation, and by all the sacrifice that such an Incarnation 
meant, that veil of matter-tissue, of universe-law, was 
drawn aside, so that we know and are sure that God is, 
and that He is the rewarder with His own ineffable love 
of all those who diligently seek Him. 

If this be so, a further and definite force of miracle 
is seen, as we regard its plaee in the service that Jesus 
did for man. What was the atonement that He made ? 
We shall make the attempt upon a future page to define 
what we conceive to be the reasonable doctrine of the 
atonement as it is developed fully in the New Testament. 
It will be enough here to consider that phase of it which 
exhibits the sacrifice of the divine love. The very 
term " sacrifice " implies the giving up of rights, the 

1 John xi. 41, 42. 



132 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

abnegation of privilege, the offering to the demand of 
need what otherwise would have been retained. It is 
thus understood that "God gave His Son," because 
God so loved the world in its sin and distress, that He 
would break over what would otherwise have been the 
divine order, what had been the divine order, indeed, 
from eternity, since " in the beginning was the Word, 
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." 1 
It was a break upon the divine order for Christ to come 
forth at all. It was a sacrifice made necessary by 
sin, an "emptying" 2 Himself of "the glory that He 
had with the Father before the world was," 3 for Him 
to take upon Himself the limitations of flesh and be 
found in fashion as a man, and being so found to further 
humble Himself, and become obedient even unto the 
death of the cross. 4 The Incarnation was miracle, and 
it was sacrifice ; it was the sacrifice of atonement as 
truly as the death of Jesus was the culmination, the 
supreme moment of that sacrifice and of the atonement. 
If then the birth of Jesus was miraculous, as we have 
seen ; if the death was miraculous, as we shall see ; if 
both were necessary diversions of the divine order that 
must have prevailed, if sin had not been in the world, — 
then every deed that Jesus did, which in its turn broke 
across the usual order of nature, was also a part of the 
same atonement, the giving up of what under all ordinary 
circumstances should have continued immovable forever. 
God so loved the world, that He would save it even at 
the expense of the death of His Son. The death of His 

1 John i. 1. 3 John xvii. 5. 

2 Phil. ii. 7. * PhiL ii. 8. 



CHRIST IN MIRACLE. 133 

Son could only be possible, as that Son should assume 
mortal conditions. Mortality for the Immortal was as 
vast a suspension of the usual and rightful order, as for 
a liquid wave to bear up feet of flesh, or for a few barley 
loaves to suffice for a multitude's hunger, — as vast, but 
perhaps no vaster, since either condition required God 
to will it and to bring it to pass for love's sake. When, 
therefore, Jesus stilled the storm on Galilee, or caused 
the fig-tree to wither under His curse, or opened the 
eyes of the blind, the deed was not isolated from the 
whole purpose of His life, nor was it for any mere evi- 
dential value such as availed in the case of Moses ; but 
it was a true sacrifice of God's nature, it was evidence of 
His willingness to bear for man's sake the infraction of 
His own order and His own right. If God had created, 
and had seen that the work of His hand " was good," 
then the suspension or change for an instant of the 
usual order of law must have been with pain to Him ; 
it was as true a sign that He was suffering for the good 
of man, as the birth or death of Jesus was a sign of the 
same great truth. And we can well understand how 
Jesus, who knew God, and to whom right and order were 
as necessarily sacred as to the Father Himself, would 
experience personal suffering when He did His mighty 
works. " I perceive that power has gone forth from Me," 1 
He said when a woman's faith had laid hold upon the 
fringe of His robe to her own healing. He did many 
of these unconscious miracles, if we may call them so ; 
for we read that " all the multitude sought to touch Him, 
for power came forth from Him and healed them all." 2 

1 Mark v. 30. 2 Luke vi. 19. 



184 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

Divine Love could heal even at the expense of the 
natural order of law. What was this but the working 
of atonement by the assumption of pain in the divine 
nature for the sake of man's salvation ? As it is written, 1 
" He healed all that were sick, that it might be fulfilled 
which was spoken by Isaiah 2 the Prophet, saying : Himself 
took our infirmities and bare our diseases." A miracle, 
therefore, altering by divine power the usual order of the 
world for the necessities of salvation and at the behest of 
love, was a direct sacrifice of the divine nature. It was the 
voluntary self -crucifixion of that Will, which had created 
the world and set the stars in their courses. No one of 
all Christ's mighty works was without its force as a part 
of that atonement, that sacrificial suffering, by which 
God sought to bring sinners to Himself. Again there- 
fore we find that for Christ, in the pursuance of His 
mission and in the accomplishment of sacrificial atone- 
ment, it was as natural to work miracles as it was for 
Him to breathe. 

But though this change of natural law was a real 
denial of self, so far as God had revealed His will in the 
observed order of Nature, it does not follow that this 
denial was such as to show lack of foreknowledge, and 
to prove vacillation, change, and infraction of the whole 
law of His being on God's part. That definition of 
miracle which is content with making it mere infraction 
of physical law, is not sufficient. Such a definition as 
depends merely upon our observation of natural pheno- 
mena is not adequate, because no miracle was done, as 
we have seen, without reference to the spirit. The 

1 Matt. viii. 17. 2 Isaiah liii. 4. 



CHRIST IN MIRACLE. 135 

occasion for the Incarnation was the actual breaking of 
law in the spiritual realm by man, sin entailing spiritual 
misery. Man's soul was imperilled ; in sin man's soul 
was lost. But it is inconceivable that God should not 
have provided for this awful emergency. His own eternal 
nature included provision for redemption. Love was law 
with Him, and love would redeem by reserving to itself 
the power to save as a law superior to every other law. 
A father secures the life of his family only by a regular 
order in which he wins its bread, and the mother keeps 
the house, and the children are at school ; and the whole 
course of the family is preserved perhaps for years 
unbroken, and the most regular and perfect development 
is manifested in its growth in body and in mind. If 
illness were an unknown thing, this would be deemed 
the inflexible order of the family. But when a child is 
smitten with fever, and the life ebbs, and the piteous 
need for an extra service knocks at the door of each 
anxious heart, then the father's own orderly life is broken 
across, and the order of the whole family is disturbed ; 
and even the most trivial matter, such as the hours for 
meals or the time for sleep, is a testimony to the over- 
whelming law of the family love, that is now supreme. 
It is the hour to save ; in that hour all formerly observed 
order yields and testifies to the superior law. The illus- 
tration is of course imperfect, since it compares the 
human with the divine. Yet we may truly say, that 
any definition of nature, or any definition of miracle, 
which leaves out the consideration of the spiritual world 
and the specific need of a diseased spiritual order, is 
unscientific. Sin is as truly a fact as the sun-rising. 



1 ! " THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

God, if we believe on Him at all as having the attributes 

ribed to Him; if He is not of demoniac 

:; e affected by the cry of His world 

in distress. The Father, if indeed He is a Father, will 

interfere to save. This interference itself is miracle. 

This act of redemption is a breaking in upon the natural, 

that is, the usually observed order of sin and death. A 

superior to any heretofore seen in action becomes 

active, and God comes more within ken. "The moon 

and the stars which He ordained were the work of His 

fingers : r; 2 in salvation " He makes bare His holy arm ; " 2 

in redemption miracles have their own law. 

Even a study of the material universe alone should 
show that observed phenomena, which fully establish 
the fact that there is law, must nevertheless make way 
for unobserved and untabulated causes, to which alone 
unexpected events can be referred. Earthquakes, which 
we Relieve beyond question to be wholly regular and 
inevitable consequences of certain conditions, are yet 
deemed irregular and sporadic because these conditions 
are imperfectly known. Astronomers first saw Biela's 
comet in 1772. It was observed again in 1805. In 
182C its orbit wsa calculated Again and again it was 
Been, or its hiding-place actually computed when it was 
not seen. But this comet suddenly broke in two. 
After another six years the parts were more than a 
million miles from each other. Since 1852 it has not 
been s^en at all, and probably never will be seen again, 
having been dissipated into meteoric dust. This comet 
thus refused to obey all known cometary laws after a 

1 Ps. viiL 3. : Is. liL 10; lix. 65; and many passages. 



CHRIST IN MIRACLE. 137 

certain time ; but no astronomer has ever doubted its exist- 
ence, or that it played its part so long as it was needed 
in space. A law hitherto unobserved, and that is even 
yet unknown, struck across all previously observed com- 
etary order, and here was irregularity, as men would call 
it. Indeed, when a law has once been determined, science 
is generally more interested in studying aberrations than 
in simply adding data to confirm regularity. If this be 
true in the physical realm, how shall any one say that 
personality and love and moral purpose, that mind and 
character desiring to produce upon other mind and 
character inestimable results, may not act in ways 
wholly unobserved before, and yet entirely in accord 
with the law of that personality under certain conditions ? 
He must be a bold reasoner who will say this. For us 
it is quite natural, wholly logical, to believe that the 
Infinite Soul, or even that such a Being as man can 
conceive, could and would hold within Himself even at 
the time of creation a purpose to redeem, cherishing a 
law of love and sacrifice as inviolable as His own Being. 
Hence there would be from the first a law of redemption, 
a power of life sent forth to undo the power of sin, and, 
itself extraordinary, to employ every method of love, 
that could impress a lost world with the reality of that 
love. Thus was Christ " the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever." l 

Thus the divine dignity of the miracles of Jesus appears. 

To many minds it has seemed unworthy of Him that He 

should have resorted to apparent thaumaturgy. Men 

have seen an incongruity between Christ's simple purity, 

1 Heb. xiii. 8. 



138 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

matchless wisdom, God-like love, and this working of 
wonders, as if He had joined the magicians, and would 
mystify His disciples, and try to substantiate, by a show 
of what they could not understand, that which needed 
no substantiation, so clearly did its own essential char- 
acter speak for it. Why, it is asked, should the reversal 
or suspension of a law of nature be needed to show that 
the golden rule is the utterance of the purest soul, or that 
manhood in Jesus was ideal? The answer is that mir- 
acle was not for this purpose, nor was it in this sense mere 
reversal of law. The whole law of God's being required 
the yielding of nature for moral ends, just as my love 
may demand the relinquishment even of my rights. The 
story of spiritual affections and moral struggle illustrates 
even within human experience this law of sacrifice on 
God's part. To rectify the realm of man's spiritual world, 
God suffered the material world to do its part. The phys- 
ical universe, as well as Heaven, bowed to redemption 
when the Word became flesh. The sacrifice of law in 
nature occupied only its own place in the great sacrifice 
of God for man. The sacrifice of nature was in accord 
with the sacrifice of nature's Creator. Had there been 
no miracle of Incarnation, and no miracle in the subse- 
quent life of Jesus on earth, then Nature had been out of 
accord with God in that time of redemption, and its very 
uniformity would have teen at odds with God's sacrifice in 
the gift of His Son. 

For such reasons it is plain that the same circum- 
stances, and only those, would demand miracles to-day. 
These circumstances do not exist. The great change in 
the spiritual world has been wrought. The spiritual con- 



CHKIST IN MIRACLE. 139 

dition of believers now fulfils the word of Jesus, " Blessed 
are they who have not seen and yet have believed." 1 
The former relations of miracle to faith have now been 
reversed. The course of thought once was from miracle 
to faith ; now it is from faith to miracle ; that is, believ- 
ing on Christ as the revelation of God, we find it possible 
to believe in the works that He is said to have done, and 
to see their place in the economy of redemption. To-day 
alleged miracle produces revulsion of faith : its first fruit 
now is doubt; and this result is quite legitimate. The 
life of man has attained such spiritual height, intellect 
has become so sanctified, that its clear view merely of the 
spiritual evidences in the character of Jesus would be 
enough to secure faith in God. " Jesus is the great mir- 
acle." Once men turned from His deeds to Him. Having 
Him we need no physical proofs, but though we see not, 
we exclaim with faith equal to that of Thomas, when he 
saw the print of the nails : " My Lord and my God." 2 

1 John xx. 29. 

2 The thought of the eighth chapter to the Romans seems to confirm 
this argument. Creation (v. 19) is represented as sharing in the sufferings 
necessary to the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was sub- 
jected (v. 20) to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of Him who 
subjected it, in hope that the creation itself shall be delivered. Men suf- 
fer, and nature suffers, and the Spirit of God groans, while intercession 
goes on. All things (v. 28) work together for good to them who love God, 
the called according to His purpose to glorify them. Therefore we may 
even say this (v. 31) : He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him 
up for us all, how shall He not also with Him freely give us all things ? 
There is nothing past, present, or to come, nothing in life or death, noth- 
ing in all creation, that shall frustrate God's saving love, which is in 
Christ Jesus our Lord. 



X. 

SOLITUDE AND PEAYEK. 

ALTHOUGH Jesus was not an ascetic, but lived in 
the centre of busy and thronging life, He loved to 
go apart from men and seek quiet and rest, with medita- 
tion and prayer. Many passages in the Gospels tell of 
such retirement, and we find in them only the natural 
record of the experience of every man whose life is ear- 
nest and devoted with intensity of application to a great 
purpose. 

The principal difference between this experience of 
Jesus and that of most men lies in the exceptional pur- 
pose of Christ's life with the perfect and easeful adapta- 
tion of His rest to the recuperation of power. Where 
few men would be able to cast off such burdens as they 
have in order to regain their strength of body and soul ; 
where fewer still would be able to keep the burden ever 
heavy upon their consciousness, and yet with unhampered 
soul seek refreshment, Jesus found it possible to go away 
from the world which He was serving and saving, to build 
Himself up in all the bodily and spiritual forces of which 
He had been depleted by His toil. 

Once He spoke of His burden, but declared that in 
bearing it He had help which made it easy. The " yoke " 
that He bore was the yoke that He urged men to take 



SOLITUDE AND PRAYER. 141 

upon themselves : " Take My yoke upon you and learn of 
Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy and My bur- 
den is light." 2 His meek and lowly heart, rebellious in 
nothing, and trustful as a child's, knowing surely that His 
Heavenly Father, of whom he had just spoken, would do 
nothing with Him and require nothing of Him save what 
was best, gave Him the only adequate aid in bearing His 
load of life, so much greater than any that His followers 
could ever bear. The water-carriers of Palestine, the por- 
ters, all who carried heavy loads, knew well enough the 
value of a yoke across the shoulders, well-fitted, with no 
chafing, by which they could carry burdens, not half of 
which could be borne with unaided hands. The yoke to 
them was no burden, though perhaps it did add a few 
pounds to their gross weight ; but these few pounds dis- 
tributed the weight of many pounds so evenly, that the 
yoke was an easeful comfort and not a curse. The yoke 
was more a part of the man than of the burden ; it gave 
more power than weight. Let no man talk of the yoke 
that Christ wore and that He recommends to weary men 
as if it were a burden added to those we already have to 
bear. "My yoke is easy and My burden is light;" 
Christ's means of carrying His dreadful load will suffice 
in proportionate degree for any man who will faithfully 
use it for his own load. So, too, Jesus spoke of having 
meat to eat that His disciples knew not of ; " My meat is 
to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His 
work." 2 The same " meekness and lowliness " of spirit, 
patent in both utterances, show that the perfect oneness 

1 Matt. xi. 29. 2 John iv. 32-34. 



142 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

of will between the Father and the Son gave to Jesus 
the refection, the sustaining power, necessary to accom- 
plish His work. But to keep this power for His spirit 
it was as needful that He should have some repose as it 
was that physical rest or material food should restore the 
depleted energies of His body. He who " grew in stature 
and in favor with God and man" in His youth, could 
only keep the health of manhood in body and soul by 
constant recuperation. He loved mankind ; but because 
He loved and served men He must withdraw from men, 
and in the silence of desert spaces find rest to body 
and soul. 

Hardly a word is needed to show why the physical 
need of rest was His as well as ours. If He was what 
we have seen Him to be, He would require quiet and rest 
as truly as food and drink. And to the greatest degree 
would this need lie heavy on Him, because, even if judged 
by the measure of any man's daily toil, the work of Jesus 
was most severe. The physician, the minister, know how 
the appeal to their sympathy is a constant drain upon 
their life. Every one engaged in public teaching has 
learned that the nervous strain of such work is unequalled. 
Jesus was teaching, preaching, healing from morning till 
night. He was the centre of throngs who pressed upon 
Him to hear His word. Strength was going out of Him 
all the time as He healed diseases. As it is written, He 
said that He perceived "virtue," power, had left Him, 
when one invalid sought His help and got it, though the 
appeal was made in secret. The frequent records of His 
bodily weariness are pathetic and eloquent testimonies as 
to the results upon Himself of His toils for men. In His 



SOLITUDE AND PRAYER. 143 

journey through Samaria He was wearied, and sat " thus " 
on the well ; in the disciples' boat He slept so soundly 
on the pillow in the stern that the storm in which they 
feared for their lives could not awake Him. Numberless 
instances will be recalled of similar records, and we find 
that none of them are surprising, if we rightly consider 
the limitations of the body in any man, and remember 
the extreme drain upon Christ by each day's life. 

But just because we find His life so laborious and 
exhausting, we may find it strange that so often, instead 
of sleeping, He was watching and praying. And yet, if 
He was the Son of God as well as Son of Man, why 
should He not find it as necessary to draw from the 
heavenly fountains of repose the draughts of rest which 
should recreate His spiritual powers, as it was needful 
to seek physical restoration from " nature's sweet restorer, 
balmy sleep " ? 

"Cold mountains and the midnight air 
Witnessed the fervor of His prayer," 

because the night and the desert-places alone gave Him 
immunity from care and the immediate pressure of ser- 
vice. So long as men were awake, they thronged Him. 
If He tried to put the sea between Himself and them, 
they either took boats and pursued Him, or journeyed far 
around the lake-shore to see Him again. 1 It was only 
when the wearied world, thinking less of spiritual suste- 
nance than He did, was buried in unconsciousness, that 
He could hold intercourse with Heaven unhindered. We 
must remember that if His physical need was great, His 
spiritual need must have been even more commanding, 

1 John vi. 24 ; Matt. xiv. 13. 



r-_i -. ♦ - ^ v '-~" 



: : : Z . ._ '-. -. '. . ' 



SOLITUDE AND PRAYER. 145 

the Father, and " the fulness of the Godhead bodily." For 
Christ meditation was prayer, and His own need was 
itself an appeal, a cry sure to find instant response from 
the Father. 

We shall see this the more clearly as we consider the 
nature of the petitions of Christ's solitude, of which we 
have any record, and as we note how He taught His disci- 
ples to pray. The popular conceptions of prayer may well 
bring us into all sorts of perplexity either when we pray 
ourselves, or think of Christ's petitions. But surely it 
would seem reasonable to define Christian prayer as 
such prayer as Christ offered or taught. Such a defini- 
tion sends us at once to the Gospels. What were the 
prayers of Jesus ? What was the answer of Jesus, 
when the disciples asked Him to teach them to pray? 
We need to make an exhaustive analysis neither of the 
Lord's Prayer, nor of the prayers of the Lord, to distin- 
guish the main characteristics of true prayer ; and these 
characteristics will reveal to us the secret of all commu- 
nion with God, when the soul withdraws from the world 
to seek Him in secret. 

" Lord, teach us to pray." 

" When ye pray, use not vain repetitions as the heathen do,, 
for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. 
Be not ye therefore like unto them : for your Father knoweth 
what things ye have need of before ye ask Him." 

At once, then, prayer is shown not to be a demand 
upon God, or even a petition for aught that is against 
His will, nor is it a request of such doubtful issue as to 
require useless repetition. This does not mean, that 

10 



146 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

we should never pray twice for the same blessing ; but 
it does mean, that God already has a greater love toward 
His children than to leave them helpless in time of 
need, or to require importunate pleading from them. 
The parable of the unjust judge, 1 indeed, teaches that 
men should keep their faith even in delay ; but it teaches 
most of all that the just Judge will not do as the unjust 
judge did, who said : " I will avenge her lest by her con- 
tinual coming she wear me out." God will avenge His 
elect, who are crying to Him day and night, and He 
will " avenge them speedily." This is the main thought 
of the parable. We cannot wear God out ! We cannot 
emphasize with Him our real need by repetitions that 
weary our lips and bruise our spirits, repetitions that 
are " vain " because they show a lack of confidence in 
God's love. He knows before we ask that we have need 
of His help. He teaches, however, that very often He 
will not give until we ask ; but He teaches nowhere 
that man shall be heard for his repetitions, and especially 
for his wilful asking. 

Now this is very conspicuous in what we call the 
Lord's Prayer. It is also true of all the prayers of our 
Lord, even when He prayed again and again for the same 
blessing ; for in such instances, while the repetition com- 
forted, the heart of Him who prayed, it did not gain the 
specific end sought by the prayer. "Our Father," we 
are Thy children, and Thy loving authority we confess 
and appeal to at once ; we desire Thy Kingdom, we pray 
that Thy will may be done ! Do we ? Have we ever 
stopped to think that unless that Divine Will is some- 

1 Luke xviii. 1-8. 



SOLITUDE AND PRAYER. 147 

times seen to run counter to our wills, it will be very 
difficult for us to believe in it ? Have we realized that a 
denial of our prayer for any special object may become 
even a help to faith, as showing that there is such a 
thing as a better will, a profounder purpose, a diviner mind 
than our own ? This great earth revolves upon its axis, 
and man whirls with it; and so long as he looks upon 
himself alone and does not see the sun or stars, he is 
not conscious of a universe outside of his own little 
habitat. It is only as he lifts his eyes and sees that 
there are worlds that do not move just as his world 
moves, that he becomes aware of the immensity and 
beauty of the whole. So if my mind knows no action 
except its own, if my will knows no will except that 
which is in consonance with itself, it will soon cease to 
believe in any other, and there will be no appeal to God, 
no prayer. If God were to give me every prayer, I 
should soon come to believe my will infallible, and I 
should acknowledge no other. " Thy will be done " lies, 
therefore, at the basis of every prayer, and is the guaranty 
of its right. 

Only one petition for material things is in the Lord's 
Prayer, and very plainly this petition involves nothing 
contrary to what we know is God's will : the sustenance 
of the body, that He has made, by the working of all 
the laws that He has ordained for that purpose. " Give 
us our daily bread ! " Here is no miracle of food for a 
lifetime at once ; here is no seizing upon the universe 
to demand that for my sustenance drought shall dis- 
appear, or the eddies of the wind be stayed. Feed me ! 
Let God do it in His own way, which I, too, for the most 



148 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

part clearly understand ; and if I do not, He knows all. 
But even if the time has come for me to die, and bread 
must fail my lips, have I not prefaced this very cry with 
the words equally of the Saviour's teaching : " Thy will 
be done in earth as it is in heaven" ? In this petition 
for daily bread the supremacy of Him who suffers not 
a sparrow to fall to the ground without His notice, is 
fully confessed. Men are taught to trust in God each 
day, more than in their wealth hoarded up and their 
bolts upon their safes. God is continually showing men 
that they cannot make very sure the future. There are 
always conditions, in which the food for ten years from 
now cannot be assured by the most provident human 
measures. God sets the time-locks on our vaults. We 
never know whether we shall be able to open them and 
draw forth our money at a certain hour or not, unless 
we know all the combinations of God. A prayer for the 
" daily bread " is therefore as truly a recognition of God's 
will and of our spiritual need of reliance on Him, as is the 
petition that precedes it in the Lord's Prayer. But on 
the other hand this prayer for physical blessing does 
not preclude human participation to secure its fulfilment 
any more than the words that follow for a spiritual 
blessing preclude the human condition of forgiveness 
upon which the divine forgiveness of our sins depends. 
Alike in the supply of daily bread and of the forgiveness 
of sins, our humility of soul, our meekness and lowliness 
of heart, are at the very foundation of that piety, which 
may expect answer from God. " Our Father," " Thy 
Kingdom," "Thy will," "Give us," " Forgive us," 
"Deliver us from evil/' — all these appeals are to the 



SOLITUDE AND PRAYER. 149 

Sovereignty, the supreme love of God. This is the 
Lord's Prayer. 

But there are other utterances of Jesus about prayer, 
which touch upon the general principles of the act, and 
therefore show what all Christian prayer must be, and 
how solitary communion with God can alone be of any 
value. We find these utterances in the last discourse of 
Jesus before the crucifixion. In the parable of the vine 
and the branches 1 are these words : " If ye abide in Me, 
and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and 
it shall be done unto you." And the glory of the Father 
is described as depending on the fruit borne by the dis- 
ciples, who thus abide in Christ. Now plainly this word 
concerning prayer is only what Jesus taught in the Lord's 
Prayer. " Thy will be done " is the same as this : " If ye 
abide in Me." " If My words abide in you " is a condi- 
tion of prayer that means nothing, if it does not mean 
that remembrance and obedience, the spirit that will ask 
nothing that is not prompted by union of desires between 
God and man, alone can give one the right to pray. Such 
a spirit in man will have no wish for aught against the 
right and good, the things necessary to the fulfilment of 
God's purposes. No petition will rise from consecrated 
lips that will be contrary to the one petition, " Thy will 
be done." No kingdom of evil in the heart of him who 
prays will stand out in opposition to the Kingdom of 
God and the will of the Supreme. The same is to be said 
of the words that come later in the same discourse. 2 The 
time will come when Jesus will be gone away. These 
men who have depended on His personal presence, and 

1 John xv. 1-8. 2 John xvi. 23. 



150 THE SEASONABLE CHRIST. 

have rarely hesitated to bring their requests to Him, shall 
turn to the Father and pray in Jesus' name. In His 
name ! Is this very different from the condition " If ye 
abide in Me " ? "Who can pray " in His name " any 
prayer contrary to His spirit and will ? Christ's name 
can never give force or authority to any petition that is 
not divine in its character. Surely these few words, " In 
Christ's Nanie," are not a mere talisman to conjure by, 
nor a seal put to a document that is fraudulent. They 
are not the signature of the Prince to a conspiracy against 
His Father's kingdom and will. In them lies no war- 
rant at all for the caprice of a selfish heart, or even for 
the lack of wisdom, which admits no height of wisdom 
above its own. Not thus could Jesus guard at once the. 
need of His disciples and the glory of His Father. The 
whole situation is shown to be one in which the real dis- 
ciple, filled with the spirit of Jesus, having the same mind 
that was in Him, meek, lowly, dependent, loving, longing, 
shall cast himself on God's love and mercy, with absolute 
faith in His care, and believing fully that whatsoever is 
asked in such wise God will grant. So far as the teach- 
ings of Christ are concerned, this is Christian prayer. 

Was the example of Christ consistent with His teach- 
ing ? To ask the question is to answer it. When was 
His prayer aught but the pleading of the divine will, of 
which He Himself was the embodied expression ? The 
only instance that could ever occur to the mind of an 
objector is itself the strongest affirmation in the Gospels 
of His submission to God's will. The prayer of Geth- 
semane finds its sole purpose in that "Nevertheless not 
My will, but Thine be done." The cup of suffering was, 



SOLITUDE AND PRAYER. 151 

pressed to the Saviour's lips. It was a draught that had 
more bitterness than any human woe, for it was the cup 
prepared for Immanuel, " God with us." As He had been 
tempted at the beginning in the desert of the Jordan, so 
now was He tried to the utmost ; but that utmost with 
Him never swept beyond God. If God was with Him, 
who could be against Him ? If God's will was to be done, 
what was any other will in opposition ? He had no will 
in opposition. His prayer in Gethsemane was only, " Let 
this cup pass from Me. Nevertheless not My will but 
Thine be done." As He had taught His disciples to pray, 
so He would pray always. If the poison of pain was 
pressed to His lips, the only antidote was ready too, — the 
will of God. By every word of God He lived ; no draught 
of woe could destroy Him so long as that word of God 
was in Him. By that word He had lived victoriously 
through Satan's tempting ; by that word He could drink 
the cup of suffering at the last. The example of Jesus 
in prayer is exactly in accord with His teaching. 

The reasonableness of such prayer is manifest. It is 
not the province of these pages to enter into a full 
discussion of the theory of prayer; but it is necessary 
to show, in a word, that the power of prayer with Christ 
was like that of miracle in His hands. No seeming diffi- 
culty that assails our faith in prayer is beyond the answer 
that has been given in the consideration of miracles. 
Can it be reasonable to pray on the one hand for what 
we know will be done any way, — God's will, — or on the 
other hand for any change in God's will, itself an absurd- 
ity ? Was Christ reasonable when He prayed thus, and 
so taught men ? He may have been meek, humble, 



152 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

devout, loving, trusting, obedient, when He prayed ; He 
may have found delight in the mere unobstructed inter- 
course of His soul with Heaven. But was He pursuing 
a rational course in praying ? The only answer is in 
Himself. If we do not know it, He knew that all things 
are in the hand of God, and that the most common laws 
inhere in that Mind, which has had its purposes from 
eternity unto eternity. If Jesus knew that the law of 
saving love, established from the beginning, had its place 
in the economy of the universe, and that nature could 
be made to serve that law in miracle, as we have seen, 
He also knew that the same law of saving love included 
a law of prayer, invited an appeal to God by which 
events might be brought to pass, that otherwise might 
never occur. He knew, what we know as yet so little 
of, the power of mind upon mind and of mind upon 
matter, and that surely God could be as strong at least 
as man is, to change, combine, rearrange the relations of 
forces to each other to produce certain effects even 
within the realm of the physical world. Jesus was not 
staggered in His divine intuitions by man's weak reason- 
ing. He saw that prevailing prayer did not involve a 
change of will on the part of Him, who from the begin- 
ning had had the purpose of redeeming love, the very 
object of that redemption being the " binding back " of 
men to Himself in a perfect and eternal communion. 
The renewed intercourse of man with God was to be. 
must be in the very nature of the case, a life of asking 
and giving, just as the stream can flow only as it draws 
without ceasing upon the mountain-springs. " Your 
life is hid with Christ in God," was a later utterance of 



SOLITUDE AND PRAYER. 153 

an Apostle ; but Jesus said it in effect, when He declared 
that by prayer, itself a natural result of abiding in Him, 
as the branch abides in the vine, the human life should 
produce such fruit as would be indisputable evidence of 
God's glory poured out upon man. It was most reason- 
able that Jesus should fill His solitude with the company 
of God, and teach men to seek that fellowship. 

Finally, then, Jesus would have contradicted Himself 
if He had not prayed. The Incarnation itself showed 
that God was at hand, not far off; immanent in nature, 
not extraneous ; above nature indeed, transcendent, yet 
feeling the life of a sparrow, and present in the whiteness 
of a lily or the sparkle of the dew. We have noted how 
miracle showed the personality and the love of God 
present to help and save, to heal and forgive. Now if 
Jesus had not prayed ; if He had not talked with God ; 
if there had been no communion of Father and Son to 
which the disciples were awed witnesses at one time, or 
sleepy and dull witnesses at another, Jesus would have 
been inconsistent with Himself, with His teaching, and 
with all His mighty signs. " God is with you " was the 
message of His birth and of every miracle. " God is 
with you, as He is with Me " was the unspoken lesson 
of every prayer. "He looked up to heaven," when He 
prayed in one place ; at another time He bowed in the 
dust ; but God did not fail Him, whether He gazed into 
the stellar spaces, or saw nothing but the ground. The 
present Father, present for the call of His children, " a 
very present help in time of trouble," was the revela- 
tion of Christ's prayer in solitude, as it was of His 
busiest life among men. 



154 THE SEASONABLE CHRIST. 

It was chiefly in this communion of Christ with 
the Father that His solitude was spent. Thus His 
refreshment and rest came to Him. Apart from the 
world, but with God, Jesus gained His power to " finish 
His work." 

And thus He elucidated for all who follow Him the 
nature of prayer. If the many popular and erroneous 
ideas of prayer are to obtain, we find innumerable per- 
plexities ; but going to Christ for our definition of Chris- 
tian prayer, which is certainly our reasonable course, 
we find this intercourse with God wholly consistent with 
our Lord's nature, and with the needs of all those who 
seek to follow Him. 



XL 

THE MAN OF SOEEOWS. 

THE mystery of pain has always baffled the human 
mind. Some of its laws have been understood, 
some benefits from it have been discerned ; but a large 
remainder of mystery always obtains, no matter what 
philosophy approaches the subject. We can only accept 
what we must. Causes often lie clean out of sight of 
their results, and we stand in the shadow of the latter, 
wondering, but powerless to escape. It is thus with 
the problem of pain. Pain is. It is a heritage of all 
conscious life. It is not peculiar to man ; it was before 
man was, and we read its awful records far back in the 
geologic ages. Whole orders of being yielded to the 
agony of violent death inflicted by superior orders or by 
changes of environment. Pain cannot be regarded, there- 
fore, as merely a result of moral failure on the part of 
man. It was necessary in the economy of progress in 
the making of a world, and the earth to-day is what it 
is only by reason of the survival of the stronger over the 
weaker forms of life until the age of man could find 
place. The first page of the Book of Genesis connects 
death with moral failure on the part of the human race. 
Experience shows the justice of this record. That 
certain inevitable and deadly results come from a failure 



156 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

to attain and keep a perfect moral nature, is as patent 
as that darkness follows the sunset. But that this ex- 
planation covers the whole problem of pain can hardly 
be granted ; nor is it necessary that we should know all 
of this mystery, in order to see how Christ, being Son of 
Man, and Son of God, should share in this common expe- 
rience of the world to which He came. 

If it were only that He might know pain as the heri- 
tage of dumb and irrational creation, it would not be 
strange to find Him, the express image of God the 
Creator, Himself the Word by which the worlds were 
made, entering into the experience of suffering. Should 
He withhold Himself from that which the meanest 
creature of His hand was called upon to endure ? Would 
it be Godlike to stand apart from woe, which was an 
inevitable attendant upon life ? If it behooved Him to be 
made like unto His brethren, that He might share per- 
fectly in their experience and be touched with the feeling 
of their infirmities ; would it not be of the same essential 
godliness to enter in some way into the experience of the 
inferior things of His creation and be in sympathy with 
the pain of the creation, that " groaneth " 1 even until now ? 
We cannot believe that God would have held Himself 
aloof from the pain of this world even if man had never 
been created. He would in some way open Himself to 
this experience of the creatures of His handiwork, with 
a sympathy in their distresses, which would be worthy 
of His own nature of love and mercy. 

But that Christ should share the pain of man is nec- 
essary to any conception of God's perfect love shown in 

1 Rom. viii. 22. 



THE MAN OF SORROWS. 157 

Christ's redeeming mission. It is of this sympathy that 
the New Testament speaks almost exclusively, since its 
message is to man, and has little to do with inferior 
orders. We have seen that Jesus was Eevealer, 
Eedeemer, Example. As Eevealer of God He showed 
God's sympathy with man in his pain; as Eedeemer, 
He declared by His mediatorial suffering the atonement ; 
as Example, He showed how men should live in a world 
of pain, and make it an agency for their own development 
in a divine life. We propose to speak of these three 
offices of Christ as they were related to the suffering of 
the world. He was Prophet, Priest, King, and as such 
He suffered for the good of man. 

As Prophet, Jesus spoke of God and showed His 
nature. All that has been said of this revelation, which 
proved God to be near, a God of love, ready to forgive 
and save, listening for the cry of the needy soul, longing 
for the redemption of the world from its evils, may be 
urged also with reference to His participation in pain. 
Even in this respect Jesus revealed God, and " God was 
in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself." If the 
old, erroneous views of God held by heathen and idolaters 
— that He was a selfish despot, dwelling utterly apart 
from men and often glad in the tortures which humanity 
suffered ; welcoming the blood and death of sacrifices even 
when those sacrifices were human — were to go without 
correction, how could the false idea have been emphasized 
better than by the revelation of a deity, who though inter- 
ested in man and demanding fealty from him, would nev- 
ertheless hold Himself wholly apart from everything in 
man's lot that partook of suffering ? How, on the other 



153 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

hand, could the false ideas of God be corrected better than 
by showing that even into man's pain God would enter, not 
withholding Himself from the worst that man could suffer, 
and showing that when men had the most need of Him, He 
would not fail them by standing apart in unapproachable 
felicity ? As the Prophet of God, Jesus showed this in 
His own person in every possible way. He suffered ; the 
stripes were heavy upon Him ; He was a man of sorrows, 
and acquainted with grief; He not only suffered, but He 
taught that it must be so. The shepherd seeks the lost 
sheep only by following it into the wilderness, daring 
the perils of forest and cliff and stream with it, and then 
bearing it homeward in his protecting arms. The father 
runs to meet the returning prodigal, his deep sorrow and 
yearning more eloquently depicted in the tearful joy of 
that moment than by any long descriptions of parental 
feelings over an ungrateful son. The fall of a sparrow 
is not so overclouded by the great death-pall of a univer- 
sal mortality as to escape the Father's notice. With the 
sisters of the dead Lazarus " Jesus wept." " I have a 
baptism to be baptized with ; a cup to drink, that ye know 
not of ; can ye drink it with me and be so baptized ?." 
And when Peter and James answered with all the bold- 
ness of ignorance, " We can," He said to them, as He 
looked down the years and saw their martyrdom, "Ye 
shall indeed thus share with me my baptism and my 
cup." But in all this wealth of His experience and 
teaching we are to see God. And why should we accept 
all else, and stagger at this ? It is a child's view of God 
to think that He must know nothing of suffering. Even 
we can see that it is not an essential part of happiness 



THE MAN OF SORROWS. 159 

that we should never know pain. The mother loves her 
child the more that she has suffered for it ; the father 
is the happier in his family and home, because he has 
toiled early and late. The intense labor of acquisition 
is one of the greatest joys of the true student. We value 
human life and count each day blessed by the human 
love in it all the more, if we have realized the awful 
blight of death and have suffered the pang of the sun- 
dering of hearts. Unbroken bliss is not, then, essential 
to the best and highest happiness. Why, then, must it 
be ascribed to God ? If, on the other hand, the most 
perfect joy is to give one's self to others, to share even in 
their sorrows and give comfort to their pain, then there 
is reason enough for our ready faith in the Christ as the 
Prophet of God even in His sufferings. 

And so it is plain how this revelation itself brings help 
to man. If the necessity of pain is such that even God 
must share it, then I can better accept the mystery and 
bear my little part in it without complaint. It is as 
Godlike to suffer as to rejoice. The wonder of suffering 
is not decreased by the divine participation in it ; but the 
great fact shall be grasped, with boundless comfort to 
human pain, that " God was in Christ," in suffering " recon- 
ciling the world unto Himself." 

But there was still another prevalent error to be cor- 
rected. In the universal perplexity concerning the exist- 
ence of suffering in the world, it had come to be believed 
that pain was always punitive, itself the evidence of sin 
in the afflicted person. The sacred books of the Jews 
are full of the recognition of this fact. Adam's sin met 
prompt retribution. It is the constant lesson of the Old 



160 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

Testament, a lesson as true as that the sun shines, that 
penalty must follow transgression. And perhaps it is 
not strange that men leaped to the conclusion that all 
pain was penalty, and that its mere existence proved the 
fact of sin in the sufferer. But they were not long in 
finding even greater perplexities from this belief. The 
book of Malachi leaves the men of his day asking, '" Of 
what use is it to serve God, when the wicked are allowed 
to prosper and the good are cast down ? " Judging from 
their circumstances it was often hard " to discern between 
the righteous and the wicked." In the great drama of 
the Old Testament Job refutes the assumption of his 
friends that his sufferings are due to his sin; and the 
Preacher in Ecclesiastes fights the old field over again 
with many conclusions of " vanity," taking refuge at last 
in the one indisputable fact that " the whole of man " is 
in duty toward God quite irrespective of the joys or sor- 
rows of life. So firmly rooted is the idea that suffering 
must be punitive, that even to-day men hasten to the 
conclusion that any evil falling upon the ungodly man is 
" a judgment " upon him, whether they can trace the con- 
nection between crime and penalty or not. 

Now Jesus took special pains to rebuke such judgments. 
He taught explicitly that pain is not always an infliction 
from God. He did not suffer the men on whom the tower 
in Siloam J fell to be so judged. It was not because the 
men whose blood had been mingled with sacrifices by 
Pilate were wicked above all other men that they suf- 
fered such a peculiar fate. And Jesus not only taught 
this in word ; every pang of His own suffering showed 

1 Luke xiii. 2-5. 



THE MAN OF SORROWS. 161 

the same great lesson. He suffered because He was 
righteous; because He had done no violence, and no 
deceit was in His mouth. He was led as a lamb to the 
slaughter. Certainly His passion could never be ascribed 
to His desert, for He was without sin. " Blessed are ye 
if ye suffer for righteousness' sake " was His word to His 
disciples ; and in His own example He showed that so 
far from being a sinner a man may be nearest to God just 
when the waves of his trouble overwhelm him. And so 
if we suffer loving Him and His righteousness, we shall 
not wonder as if a blow had missed its mark and fallen 
on us undeserved, for it is not thus that we any more 
than Jesus are " smitten of God and afflicted." Nor shall 
we argue that " it is vain to serve God," and that wrong 
triumphs over good in God's universe. We shall not 
consider our case a malignant exception, nor even a part 
of the unreasonable torment of a world forsaken by God. 
We are saved from all such awful conclusions by the 
great fact that has been shown us by God in Jesus Christ : 
that suffering is a necessary part of a soul's life ; that for 
one reason or another, seen or unseen, our life and the 
Infinite Life are equally bound together in the necessity 
of pain. It makes no difference that one cause may be 
assigned for the passion of Jesus, and another may be the 
probable cause of mine ; I accept what even Jesus could 
not escape, sure that nothing, whether life or death, can 
separate me from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ. 
Jesus, as Priest no less than as Prophet, endured the 
anguish of life in the flesh. We reserve for the next 
chapter a consideration of the atoning work of Jesus upon 
Calvary. He Himself was there laid upon the altar, and 



162 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

by His death completed the mediatorial suffering that He 
was called upon to bear. Upon the cross He is our great 
High Priest making atonement for the sins of the people ; 
but He was there also the Lamb of God, the Sacrifice 
itself. His priestly suffering cannot be separated, there- 
fore, from His sacrificial pain. But in few words now 
we may merely call attention to the fact that this priestly 
suffering was quite in the usual order of human experi- 
ence. It was no strange thing, in its essential character, 
that a superior Being with special endowment for the 
blessing of others should subject Himself to pain in order 
to fulfil the one special purpose of bringing men to God. 
Even so far as the elevation of man is due to the efforts 
of his fellows, the end is gained by substitution ; and the 
one who stands nearer God and more in the open light of 
heaven than his fellows do, leads them on to the bless- 
ings that are to be gained only by his sacrifice. The man 
who has nothing but gladness in his life, never accom- 
plishes the martyr-victories of him whose blood is spent 
in the service of his race. Unbroken joys enervate the 
heart and lead to no heroic struggles through which man- 
kind shall rise to heights before unknown. But pangs of 
body and soul, that may actually slay the one who suffers 
them, lead the world upward to fulness of life. The 
phenomenon of human birth might show us this. And 
what substantial advance in science, law, literature, mor- 
als, social conditions and customs, or religion, has ever 
been made except by the enduring toil and the positive 
sacrifice of some one's body and mind ? Each generation 
dies to leave a rich legacy to the next generation, which 
in its turn, standing one step higher on the stairway of 



THE MAN OF SORROWS. 163 

God, bends down to lift at the cost of its life its successor 
to a better and higher grade than itself has occupied. So 
do we serve each other, if we are true. So, if we are 
worthy the name of men, do we present ourselves as 
priests mediating between the lower and the higher, the 
worse and the better, the failure and the ideal, and mak- 
ing sacrifice of toil, or comfort, or money, or blood, to 
bring the lower to the higher. In fact we observe this 
great principle of priestly suffering even in the most com- 
mon deeds of our lives, by which we subject ourselves to 
deprivation of any sort for the sake of those who are 
dependent on us. How then should the Priest, who was 
bringing human life to the Highest, be exempt from the 
one great law of attainment ? This we may say of Him 
without any reference to that which must be said later of 
the Lamb, simply as the offerer of sacrifice, as the toiler 
who bestows blessing on those who toil not. As the 
High Priest of our salvation, no less than as the Lamb 
slain on God's altar, does Jesus present Himself as our 
Substitute, in the line of the universal law of substitu- 
tion, whereby the benefactor and the beneficiary become 
mutually possible. 

But more than this as Priest Jesus must suffer that we 
might be sure of His sympathy, given to us not merely 
as showing the love of God, but also as proving His 
priestly power, His ability rightly to present the nature 
of suffering humanity to God. " For in that He Himself 
hath suffered being tempted, He is able to succor them 
who are tempted." 1 Surely it is reasonable that He who 
is to present my cause to God should know my case most 

i Heb. ii. 18 : iv. 15, 16. 



164 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

perfectly ; that He who shall offer sacrifice for sin shall 
know the measure of the need and shall pray for bound- 
less pity to cover si::. If He knew the wiles of evil; it 
He knew the wei - of the flesh; if He had even 

■ sd tempted, though He had not sinned, He could the 
atter inspire faith in us, that He is able tc succ : them 
who are tempted 

But also as our Kiu:: Jesus suffered pain; and seeing 
Him in His agony we may know how the servant should 
bear the cross in following the same path. This via dolo- 
rosa that opens before the feet of eyery man has been 
made holy by the feet that were nailed to the cross. Jesus 
came to earth as the Eeyealer of God., but also as the 
Teacher, the Example, the Lord of men. How shall man 
live The answer is in Him who was the Life, which 
was the Light of men. Shall He not be the L:^'ht of 
men in the sufferings incident to life, as in all else ? 
I 3gard Him, then,, "who, for the joy that was set : :rf:re 
Him endured the sross lespising the shame, . . . and con- 
sider Him who endured such ::::::; :liction of sinners 
against Himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your 
minds." l 

We said aboye that one cause might possibly be as signed 
for human suffering, an 1 mother for Christ's pain: but 
that difference of cause could not inyalidate either the 
fact : r the comfort to be drawn from it. So there may 
be many causes for human pain, and many ends to be 
gained by it, though the sufferer may be so blinded by 
his :^ars that he cannot see the shining purpose in the 
distance. Human pain may be punitiye, and so haye its 

i Heb. xii. 2, 3. 



THE MAN OF SORROWS. 165 

place in the administration of justice and the vindication 
of government. It may also be purgatorial, and the vine 
of God's own planting may be pruned and purged to make 
it bear the richer vintage, and in this pain the punitive 
element is wholly wanting. And it is a matter of the 
most common observation that pain may be simply pre- 
ventive, a warning against greater suffering, as the touch 
of a finger-tip upon a flame may save the whole body from 
fiery death. Perhaps in Christ we see none of these pur- 
poses of suffering. He could not be punished, for He had 
not sinned; He needed not to be purged, for He was 
pure and perfect ; and yet, as we shall see, He must be 
tested to the utmost in order that He might be perfect. 
And He needed no warning who lived only by every word 
that proceeded from God. Other reasons brought suffer- 
ing to Jesus. But pain is pain, from whatever cause it 
come and to whatever purpose it proceeds. The great 
fact remains, that in pain we have our Example and our 
Lord. He who showed us the right uses of joy, showed us 
also how to endure evil. He lost no faith in His Father 
when the cup of agony could not be allowed to pass from 
His lips. " I am He," He said with calmest soul when 
they came to lead Him away to the last tortures. " Put 
up thy sword into the sheath," He said, when Peter would 
stretch forth a human weapon against God's will ; " the 
cup which my Father hath given Me, shall I not drink 
it?" 1 He would brook no delay; He would allow no 
rebellion ; He would be obedient, even unto the death of 
the cross. 

Some would have looked out upon the world from that 

1 John xviii. 5, 11. 



166 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

place of betrayal on the Mount of Olives, and believed 
that evil ruled triumphant ; that the world was all wrong, 
becoming worse and worse, the last ray of its hope fading 
out ! The disciples might well have been the most con- 
firmed pessimists at that hour, just as those who have 
suffered, or sympathized with suffering most keenly, have 
felt it almost impossible to believe that God reigns and 
that He is good. But Christ never had a doubt, and He 
never uttered one hopeless syllable or one word of rebel- 
lion. Now He suffered silently and with a soul of supernal 
beauty ; in a few days He was to lead those same disciples 
out to this same Mount Olivet, and make the place where 
He had suffered the place of His ascension to His Father. 
He could wait. He knew that He would be glorified. 
"For the joy that was set before Him He endured." 

Such faith conquers. God pity the man who meets 
the inevitable pain of this life with nothing but rebellion 
in his heart, and with that short-sighted vision that can 
see only so far as the earthly horizon ! Poor indeed is 
he who must suffer, belieA r ing that it is a godless world, 
forsaken of mercy, devoid of love, given over to remediless 
evil. But blessed is he who suffers as Christ did. He 
shall be comforted ; he shall inherit all the promises of the 
beatitudes ; he shall grow Christ-like, God-like. Beauty 
and strength shall increase in him. In drinking the cup 
that no prayer can dash away from his lips ; in draining 
the dregs that are every man's inevitable portion, he shall 
become aware of an angel from heaven strengthening 
him. The faithless, drinking the same cup, cannot see 
the good that lies beyond the rim of the chalice of pain. 
But the disciple of Jesus knows that the Father, to whom 



THE MAN OF SORROWS. 167 

he cries submissively for help, has not forgotten him, suf- 
fers with him in his trial, and prepares the soul for its 
glory with Himself. 

Strange indeed would it have been if Jesus, the Son of 
Man, had held aloof from pain, this common lot of man 
in which he needs the help of a Saviour at least as much 
as in the hours of peace and joy. Christ did not fail 
mankind even in this respect. For our sakes, as well as 
for His own, He was " made perfect through sufferings." 



w 



XII. 

CALVARY 

i:;."r tliitle.: :: Clrl: :-..= tie eeere Seeeeret 
"a man erf sorrows and acquainted with grief," 
even before we have seen Him brought to the Cross. 

But now the Lamb of God is dying, crucified by the 
3 ■_.- :: tie Te— = ?.eee :le ~el pertxisii : :: :: Itlete A 
thief hanzs xtee t::^: = iie ::te :: ~l:te reel :e 
Him, while the other turns to Him ~ ::"_ repents ni :; ::1 
and receives His promise of Paradise. It is e present- 
ation of the world's life. Jesus, the crucified Bedeemer ; 
:re tie :ee letee e retenteie: dinner :ee :l tie itlet tit 
represents ::"t :: tie ttreretentie:.: «:tel: t: tie ::rteeei 
forgiveness and Paradise with the Savlee t: die lattei 
lis :~:i :l:iee e:te tlsee. Hi: ~i= tie eeeite :: 

Tee leer: :-.: ere: :e":":.: : .:: _:j ; e: eret etter :ee 
anguished remonstrance of Peter: "Be it far from 
Thee, Lord! This shall not be done unto Tlee Shall 
ignominy and torment come to such a lord? Shall 
death, can death smite that Holy Thing, who was born of 
"irrtt. I-Ier- tut ler:rter. :" ::t E:> -e: ; : ' Tie: 
E: should be the Lord of life, knowing all its delights 
and all its sorrows too, and suffering no part of life to 
: Hi; eztereenee ::e ~ :'.'. ;:e eel:::::' let 



CALVARY. 169 

that He should die, give up life, suffer even to this extreme 
the lot of those who are in the flesh, seems incredible. 
His incarnation, His miracles, His wisdom, holiness, love, 
His doctrine, have seemed reasonable to us ; but just 
because His life and power were such, we ask the ques- 
tion with the more shrinking and awe, " Can He die ? " 
What is the need of His dying ? What awful necessity 
was laid upon Him to pass thus from the life that He 
had glorified ? 

The answer comes in His own words. Seven times 
He spoke on the Cross before He died. As the torture 
fell upon Him, He prayed for His murderers, who indeed 
little realized their own part in this awful tragedy : 
" Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 
To the penitent thief He spoke the old divine word of 
forgiveness, that had so often passed His lips, and gave 
the promise of the eternal life : " Verily I say unto thee, 
to-day thou shalt he with Me in Paradise." To His 
mother He spoke, giving her lovingly to the care of John. 
Then came the cry of bodily anguish : " / thirst" Here 
were words that we should expect, for thus far all these 
utterances are quite in the line of His daily life, betray- 
ing bodily need and the loftiest qualities of divine 
thought and love. Suddenly He spoke again. It was 
not a petition to Heaven for relief. The Garden of 
Gethsemane had ended such prayers for Him. It was 
a cry, an exclamation of such horror, that no other lips 
ever uttered the like : " My God, My God, why hast Thou 
forsaken Me ! " This was a new experience. This came 
to Him like a black surprise. " Forsaken ! Why I " 
But even this He soon saw to be necessary to His redeem- 



170 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

ing work, and He spoke again: "It is finished." Then, 
at last, with the whole will of the Father made clear 
to Him, with faith unshaken though that cry of despair 
had been wrung from His lips, with gladness unspeak- 
able that all was done, with a radiant foregleam of the 
eternal home, to which He could now go, He said : 
"Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit." 

Plainly the words on the Cross are those of that Holy 
Thing, that was born in Bethlehem, Son of Man and Son 
of God. They are words of human life ; they are words 
of divine life. When all the work for man is finished, 
He turns to His Father, and gives Himself to Him. Son 
of Man He still is, Son of God too ; and thus He dies. 

But as we look on Him as He hangs upon the Cross, 
we remember. What were His own declarations of His 
purpose in coming into the world and assuming human 
life ? What were His predictions of this hour ? What 
were the probable requirements of God and of the world, 
whom He was bringing together in peace that should 
last forever ? We have heard His declarations of the 
purpose of His Advent : " For this cause was I born, 
that I might bear witness unto the truth." What that 
truth was is patent from His other words and from His 
life : the truth of God's nature ; the power of His love ; 
His resolve to save ; His detestation of sin and desire 
for man to share His own life. " The Son of Man is come 
to seek and to save that which was lost." " God so loved 
the world that He gave His Son." And Jesus repeatedly 
declared that to accomplish this work He must die. 
With growing frequency He impressed it upon His 
disciples that no end but this must be expected. " His 



CALVARY. 171 

hour" was ever in His sight, and He did all that He 
could to teach His followers to expect it with Him. If 
they could not, if they would not believe that He could 
thus die, we are hardly surprised. 

But in all these prophecies of the end He showed 
something of the divine reason in the sacrifice yet to be 
made. " As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilder- 
ness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up ; * " the 
Son of Man came to minister and to give His life a ran- 
som for many ; " 2 " from that time forth Jesus began to 
show unto His disciples, how that He must go unto 
Jerusalem and suffer many things of the elders and 
chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised 
again the third day ; " 3 " and I, if I be lifted up, will draw 
all men unto Me ; this He said, signifying what death He 
should die." 4 These direct words concerning His death on 
the Cross are multiplied in many passages that we need 
not quote. Enough to say that He plainly foresaw that 
it must be as true of Him as of any life, that " except a 
corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth 
alone ; but, if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." 5 And 
it was in this respect, that He laid down His life of His 
own accord, and "no man took it from Him," 6 though 
He was slain by treachery and fraud and violence. The 
death of Jesus was in the direct line of heavenly purpose, 
the fit and necessary completion of His earthly service, 
without which that service would have been forever 
vain. 

What was this necessity, then, and why did Jesus 

1 John iii. 14. 3 Matt. xvi. 21. 5 John xii. 24. 

2 Matt. xx. 28. i John xii. 33. 6 John x. 18. 



172 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

speak thus of " His decease, which He should accomplish 
at Jerusalem " ? Why was this the theme of surpassing 
interest chosen for the discourse upon the Mount of Trans- 
figuration, 1 when Moses and Elijah, who had long been 
dwellers in the realm of spirits, were joined with Peter, 
James, and John, in wondering audience ? If we regard 
simply the elements of the question, as they have already 
appeared to us, we shall not fail of answer. And the 
answer will be seen to affect each of the three persons of 
the great work, — God, man, and the Mediator Himself. 

1. With reference to Jesus, it was necessary to show 
that to the very last possible trial He was true and 
sinless. If He was not sinless up to the very last, it 
would be easy to believe that He was smitten of God for 
His own sins, not for the sins of the world. But how 
could we know that He was perfect Himself, if He had 
not endured even the death of the Cross ? If He had not 
endured to the end, and to such an end as this, He would 
have fallen short of perfection ; and if the supreme test 
had not been applied, there would always have been room 
for doubt. The writer to the Hebrews notes this : 2 " But 
we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels 
for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor ; 
that He by the grace of God should taste death for every 
man. For it became Him, for whom are all things and 
by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, 
to make the captain of their salvation perfect through 
sufferings, for both He that sanctifieth and they who are 
sanctified are all of one, for which cause He is not 
ashamed to call them brethren ; " and " He offered up 

i Luke ix. 28-36. 2 Heb. ii. 9-11 ; v. 7-10; xii. 3, 4. 



CALVARY, 173 

prayer and supplications with strong crying and tears 
unto Him who was able to save Him from death, and 
was heard in that He feared ; though He were a Son, yet 
learned He obedience by the things which He suffered, 
and being made perfect He became the author of eternal 
salvation unto all that obey Him." The third passage 
appeals to Christ's followers to do as He did: "Ye have 
not resisted unto blood, striving against sin," as if, until 
that end is reached, there should be no relaxing of effort, 
for even the extreme suffering is to be accounted as chas- 
tening from God, by which the soul is made pure. The 
celebrated passage in Plato's " Eepublic " 1 describing the 
just man, who is " entirely just," is to the same effect : 

"At the side of the unjust man let us place the just man in 
his nobleness and simplicity, being, as iEschylus says, and not 
seeming. There must be no seeming, for if he seem to be just 
he will be honored and rewarded, and then we shall not know 
whether he is just for the sake of justice or for the sake of honors 
and rewards ; therefore let him be clothed in justice only, and 
have no other covering ; and he must be imagined in a state of 
life very different from that of the unjust man. Let him be the 
best of men, and be esteemed to be the worst; then let us see 
whether his virtue is proof against infamy and its consequences. 
And let him continue thus to the hour of his death, till he has 
reached the uttermost extreme. . . . The just man will be scourged, 
racked, bound, will have his eyes burnt out ; and at last, after 
suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled." 

The last suffering of all, the extreme penalty of human 
nature, must be endured before we can be sure that there 
is no " seeming," no pretence, no sham, but that all is 
true ; before we can be sure that even if deceit be want- 

1 Book II. Jowett's Translation. 



174 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

yet that strength and grace are sufficient to endure 
the trial without foiling into sin. To die as the ideal 
man of Plato's vision died, or to perish as Jesus of the 
Gospels suffered, is necessary to show that obedience is 
perfect. " Obedience unto death ;" u He became obedient 
even unto the death of the Cross;" "He was made per- 
fect by the things which He suffered;" He "resisted 
unto blood, striving against sin," — such words as these 
find their full significance only as we see Christ up to 
the very last moment " learning obedience, " l and so 
made " perfect " and ready to become "the author of sal- 
vation to all them who obey Him." His true disciples 
"obey Him." It may be objected that very few of them 
are subjected to any test of holiness comparable to the 
sufferings of Christ. This is very true. By God's grace 
we are not put to the severest tests. TTe are accepted 
of Him before we are perfected. For us there is a place 
for grace and absolute forgiveness of sin ; but for Christ 
there could be left no place for forgiveness. He must 
need no forgiveness, for in Him must be no sin. And 
that there might be no sin in Him, He must be perfectly 
tested and manifested to all men as the guiltless Son of 
God. As a fact God demanded more of Jesus than He 
exacts of men. Their experience falls short of what 
He suffered. In them is sin even under the stress of 
the less temptation to which they are subjected. It is 
not necessary to put them to the worst trial, for they 
fail in the least temptation. But in them the promise 
of perfection at last as the work of grace is accepted 
through Christ. Christ, however, must be proved per- 

i Heb. v. 8, 9. 



CALVAEY. 175 

feet. He must be so manifested to the world, for thus 
only could He be our Saviour. 

2. We see this, too, in the relation which the Mediator 
bore to God as He hung upon Calvary. If He was 
Mediator on the cross, as at all other times in His 
life, then that supreme sacrifice must have had its effect 
upon God no less than upon Christ and the world that 
He was saving. We repeat here that key-passage : " God 
was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself." Here, 
as elsewhere, we would keep the Incarnation before our 
eyes. We shall not fear to reiterate, therefore, as so 
often before, that " God was in Christ," even when He 
hung upon the Cross. 

What does this mean ? Plainly it means that so far as 
God dwelt in the flesh and tabernacled among men for 
the purpose of salvation, God suffered in that salvation. 
Why hesitate to say, The Immortal took up into itself 
mortality ? God did not die ; but Christ died. God was 
greater than Christ, as He said: "My Father is greater 
than I." The eternal Father did not die; the eternal 
Spirit did not die. But so far as the divine nature dwelt 
really in Christ, that eternal nature experienced the pangs 
of death ; the deathless learned what it was to die. Just 
as truly as the divine life had learned, through the Incar- 
nation, the human life, and had taken into itself all the 
common experiences of man's being, and yet had been 
all the time greater than man's life, — so now, through the 
Incarnation also, death had been taken into the divine 
consciousness and " was swallowed up of life." 1 

How this was done no man can say, just exactly as no 

1 2 Cor. v. 4. 



176 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

raan can say how the divine nature took upon itself flesh 
in the womb of the Virgin ; but the fact is as reasonable 
and as credible as the Incarnation, or, for that matter, as 
any of the mysterious phenomena of human life itself, — 
birth or death, the union of soul and body, the structure 
of mind, the very principle of life. It may be a paradox 
to say that the Immortal tasted of mortality; but the 
paradox is relieved if we go farther, and, adhering closely 
to the words of Jesus, still remember that His Father 
was greater than He ; so that it is as sure that the cross 
did not slay God, as that in the cradle of Bethlehem 
there was a renunciation of the infinity that Christ had 
with God before the world was. Thus, though God 
learned mortality, by the cross, too, God proved Himself 
greater than death. There " death was swallowed up in 
victory ; " and though Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man, 
died, yet, as the Te Deum sings, He " overcame the sharp- 
ness of death," and did " open the Kingdom of Heaven 
to all believers." x 

Accepting the revelation of the Cross, then, as the 
suffering of God on account of man's sin and in behalf 
of man's salvation, the atonement thus effected is at 
once relieved of any imputation of unrighteousness, of 
injustice, in laying upon an innocent substitute, by any 
arbitrary decree whatever, the sufferings of the guilty. 
" God was in Christ." " God was reconciling the world 
unto Himself." What a righteous God could not do; 

1 This is no denial of the distinction of persons in the Trinity, like that 
involved in the ancient Patripassianism of the West and the Sahellianism 
of the East. It is simply the reassertion of the Scriptural teaching that 
the divine nature by its incarnation voluntarily rendered itself capable of 
suffering, even to the extent of what human beings know as death. 



CALVARY. 177 

what no true government would ever attempt, — the pre- 
servation of the guilty by laying his penalty upon an 
innocent third person, — this was not done on Calvary ; 
but God did there what could be done with perfect 
righteousness: He Himself suffered the consequences 
of the world's transgression. Even in faulty human 
governments a place is always reserved by law in which 
clemency and grace may act. And in given circum- 
stances such forgiveness is righteous. But never can 
forgiveness come by laying penalty upon the innocent, 
even though the innocent voluntarily offer to assume it. 
Kighteousness revolts from the substitution of an inno- 
cent third person for the transgressor, and no conceivable 
righteous government would allow it. But the very 
righteousness of government demands a place for mercy 
upon its own assumption of responsibility; and it pro- 
vides for the freest pardon, when the wisdom and benevo- 
lence of the government itself will assume all risk that, 
may follow from the remission of penalty. The govern- 
ment itself assumes the penalty ; takes up the sentence 
of the pardoned man ; by its own inherent life and by 
the power of its own righteousness overcomes the con- 
sequences of remission, and keeps its own law by its 
substitution of grace. 

It is wholly in accord with this truth that Jesus is 
always called the Lamb of God, never the Lamb of man. 
He is of God's nature, 1 of God's appointing, 2 of God's 
providing, 3 of God's offering, 4 of God's acceptance, 5 of 
God's justifying, 6 of God's glorifying. 7 Although men 

1 John i. 1. 3 John iii. 16. U p e t. ii. 4-6. 1 Phil. ii. 9. 

2 Rom. iii. 25. * Rom. viii. 32. 6 i Tim. iii. 16. 

12 



ITS THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

had been sinners through all generations, and had offered 
up their fellow human-beings to placate the gods, God 
had never revealed any satisfaction with such a price for 
sin. The instructed Jewish race had a great array of 
sacrifices for ceremonial cleansing, but not a man dreamed 
of offering up a fellow Jew ; nor would a single sinner 
have dared to take the Son of God, when at last revealed 
as such and as a Lamb without blemish and without 
•spot, as an offering to be slain as the price of forgiveness. 
It was not so that Christ died. He died the victim of 
men's sins ; but " no man took His life from Him ; " He 
laid it down of Himself. " God was in Christ reconciling 
■the world unto Himself." From the beginning God had 
His law of forgiveness, and so Christ was the Lamb slain, 
and in Him men were redeemed from the foundation 
of the world. He was God's Offering ; He was God's 
Offering of Himself ; He was the Exposition, the Reve- 
lation, the Word, which declared that God suffered " even 
unto death " that man might be redeemed. 

It will thus be seen that Christ was true Substitute 
for man, but substitute for man only because " God was 
in Christ." If my son has sinned against me, I cannot 
•lay his punishment on his guiltless brother, for that 
would be a great moral wrong. I cannot even accept 
ithat brother's offer of himself, and pour out wrath upon 
him, though he offer himself spontaneously and out of 
purest love to His brother : still I should be unjust and 
wrong. But I can myself suffer, if my son's sin has been 
wholly against me ; I can assume all the evil resulting 
from the crime, provided I injure no other member of 
my family, or of the world, by my clemency. I can lay 



CALVARY. 179 

my heart bare ; I can forego my rights ; I can bow myself 
in untold sorrow and open not my mouth in complaint ; 
and I can forgive freely my erring child, provided I 
do him no harm by so doing, and inflict no wrong upon 
any other. If I had the power to insure all these condi- 
tions, I could save my son thus with perfect right. If 
I had the power ! But in me resides no mystery of the 
Trinity. In me is no power of extrusion, which at the 
same time is retention of the qualities of my nature and 
the experiences of my being, such as God could show in 
Jesus Christ. I can never save, as God saves, but only 
in a far-off and imperfect imitation of the divine sorrow, 
that redeems. God's Son was so truly His own, Only 
Begotten for the very necessity of self-revelation, that 
in Him, and not without Him, could God suffer on 
account of man's sin, and so suffering could forgive. 
Such forgiveness showed no fiction and simulation of 
wrath laid upon Jesus; it brought no moral ruin upon 
the world, that would argue by immunity from penalty 
that sin was favored of God and might be freely indulged. 
On the other hand the sinner himself, as we shall see, 
was saved from sin at the same time that he was 
delivered from wrath. All conditions of right and justice, 
as well as of grace, were secured, and so God could for- 
give. He could not have forgiven otherwise. He could 
not have been just and yet the justifier of them who 
are in Jesus, unless Jesus had thus made it possible for 
God to suffer in the sinner's stead. But by the power 
of the Incarnation ; by all His sacrificial life ; by the act 
of death at last, Jesus wrought the only possible atone- 
ment that could please God, or satisfy man. So only 



180 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

could Jesus cry at last, " It is finished ! " When His 
blood was shed, there was remission of sin. 

In this way we catch a glimpse of the awful agony in 
the cry : " My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken 
Me ! " Christ's very life was oneness with the Father. 
But we have seen that in a sense there was separation 
from the Father even in the Incarnation itself, a laying 
aside of divine attributes, a necessity of prayer, a limi- 
tation within the conditions of human life, so that 
He was constantly bearing the sins of the world in 
the sense that He was suffering for them. But now 
was the moment of supreme limitation, of utter renun- 
ciation. Now He sank wholly beneath the wave of 
mortality. It now seemed as if the heritage that He 
had received from His human birth was about to 
triumph. He could not cry : " Death is swallowed up 
in victory," but only, "Victory is swallowed up in death." 
As it seemed to His poor disciples, so for one moment 
it seemed to Him, that it was all over with His 
mission itself. Death was upon Him. The wrong 
was triumphing. And in the depths of His own Being 
it was the God in Him retiring before the last demands 
of the human. God was in Christ But Christ was 
dying. Death for Him could not be, it seemed, without 
the departure of God. It seemed so. It was worse than 
the rending apart of soul and body ; it was the rending 
apart of Christ, the unspeakable contradiction of mortality 
and immortality, with the apparent victory of the former. 
Jesus felt His immortality going. "0 God, why hast 
Thou forsaken Me ! " If God left Him, 1 then He would 

1 See a beautiful passage in a sermon on this text in Passions-und Oster- 
feier, by Dr. L. T. Schulze, Professor of Theology at Konigsberg. 



CALVARY. 181 

be indeed only human in death ; all His mission would 
be vain ; the world was lost ; and God — The thought 
staggers and reels before the possibilities resulting to 
God. This was the supreme pang of the Cross ; this was 
the price of our redemption in His blood. We are reuni- 
ted to God, because Jesus felt Himself forsaken of God. 

Thus could God " be just, and yet the justifier of him 
who believeth in Jesus." In this sense was Jesus "set 
forth of God [still of God], to be a propitiation through 
faith in His blood," for without Him God could not have 
taken into Himself the results of transgression, and could 
not have offered Himself the victim of sin. He would 
still have been " angry with the sinner every day ; " still 
the old law would have prevailed, " The soul that sinneth 
it shall die." There would have been no substitution 
possible had not Christ been the Lamb of God, in whom 
God suffered and through whom He could forgive. But 
when the inevitable penalty of sin was thus borne by 
God Himself in the person of Jesus, then was justice 
satisfied at the very source of law, and God could forgive. 
Sin paid its penalty in God's suffering. Love was shown 
to be consistent with right. God would have been just 
if He had not accepted suffering in Himself to save man ; 
but, doing that, He was equally just and loving, and His 
love wrapped itself round His justice, as one garment 
of immaculate purity may infold another. His " robe 
of righteousness " was thus as a " garment of salvation " 
to every one who believes. 

3. To every one who believes ! This reference to the 
faith of man placed in the Eedeemer, leads us to the 
further thought plainly taught in the Scriptures, — that 



1S2 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

because God was in Christ, a great moral result was 
effected in the nature of man, by which Jesus was also 
truly " a propitiation " of God. God could forgive sin, 
as He never could have done righteously under other 
conditions, because Jesus was Son of Man, as well as Son 
of God. We saw in our vision of Christ in the Cradle 
that the Incarnation does not teach that Jesus took into 
His being a human nature that had already been purified 
from all human sinfulness. He was born of a virgin, but 
not because that virgin knew no sin. The profoundest 
significance of the Incarnation must include the taking 
of sinful nature into union with the divine and sinless 
nature, to the purification of the former. So was Jesus 
from the beginning " without sin," though He had as 
truly come from man as from God. This same truth He 
showed all through His life. It appears equally in His 
death. To the end He was sinless. " Even unto the 
death of the cross" He endured. Was it not proved, 
then, that by God's gracious union of Himself, of His 
own Spirit with sinful humanity, that not for a moment 
could that humanity remain sinful ? Was not redemp- 
tion as a possibility forever demonstrated ? Was it not 
shown on the cross, as it never could have been shown 
short of the cross, that humanity in conjunction with God 
could and would triumph in the end ? Was it not shown 
that as Christ led the captivity of all deadly things cap- 
tive, so to Christians also in due time would be given 
the victory over death ? We shall see, that the heritage 
that Christ sent to His followers in the Spirit after His 
departure, was the sure development to its perfect con- 
summation of this redemption of man's life by the commu- 



CALVARY. 183 

nion of God's life. But Jesus was Himself the first fruits 
of the great harvest of the perfected and deathless 
humanity. And thus prospectively Jesus was set forth 
as a propitiation. God could not have been just, and yet 
the justifier of any sinner, concerning whom there was 
doubt as to his turning away from sin actually and for- 
ever. Until it had become a fact demonstrated, that God 
in human life could create in that life such positive 
cleansing, as to bring about moral perfection under every 
test, it would not have been just to forgive and set the 
seal of favor on him, who had sinned. But in Christ was 
the promise, the pledge of the perfected humanity. He 
went through the ordeal of redemption. He showed that 
depraved human nature would not fail when brought 
into oneness with the divine. " I in them and Thou in 
Me," would be the all-powerful secret whereby success- 
ful redemption would be wrought, even as He prayed for 
His disciples before He died. 

But the death of Jesus not only showed this as the 
final result of man's living in contact with God. It 
showed that humanity was willing to be sacrificed ; that 
redeemed life would lay itself down in bloodiest death 
for the sake of doing the will of God. The death of 
Jesus was the death of the Son of Man. The Son of 
Man was the ideal man. He represented the supreme, 
consummate flower of the redeemed children of God. 
Therefore the cross was the altar on which every man, 
who would be turned to God, offered himself in the 
person of Christ a sacrifice for sin and in the service of 
the righteous will of God. On the cross we see ourselves 
righteous with the righteousness that is through faith in 



184 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

Christ, but dying nevertheless, willing offerings for the 
purpose of overcoming the sins of the world. 

It was in this sense that Saint Paul said, in support of 
his assertion that he was constrained by the love of 
Christ to sacrifice himself to the utmost in behalf of the 
Corinthian Christians : " Because we thus judge, that 
if one died for all, then all died ; and that He died for 
all that they who live should not henceforth live unto 
themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose 
again." l Paul saw himself crucified in Jesus. Why ? 
He says that he died, and all disciples died, in Christ, 
in the sense that the old selfish life was slain ; sin was 
slain ; and sin is perpetually slain in Paul and every 
believer who now gives himself to unselfish service in 
the salvation of men. Selfishness, self-will, were cruci- 
fied in Christ forever, and the believer sees himself slain 
on the cross with Jesus. Self dies ; the new being comes 
forth, and immortal love lives after the cross has been 
endured. It is not merely, therefore, an artificial and 
arbitrary decree that repentance of sin shall be a condi- 
tion of forgiveness, a condition on which the sacrifice of 
Christ shall avail for the sinner. It is rather an essential 
part of Christ's sacrifice that as it is shared by the dis- 
ciple that disciple dies to selfish sin. and the old self 
really meets its condemnation and is slain, while a new 
life of right comes forth. 

Xo man can turn with faith to the crucified Jesus 
without being overcome. Our sin is crucified within us. 
We are conquered by such love. We are conquered, too, 
by the awful revelation of the malignant sin that killed 

1 2 Cor. y. U, 15. 



CALVARY. 185 

such a Christ. The moral effect of the crucifixion upon 
man is no less than the effect it had, if we may so speak, 
upon the mind of God. If Christ's sacrifice disposed 
God to forgive, it also disposed man to be forgiven. And 
so Jesus, dying upon Calvary, brought to its consum- 
mation His work of redemption, and became the perfect 
Mediator between God and man. 



XIII. 

THE EISEN LOED. 

/^OULD death prevail ? Could Jesus be finally over- 
^ come by " the sharpness of death " and remain its 
victim forever ? It is almost inconceivable. It is wholly 
inconsistent and unreasonable. We stand by the sealed 
tomb in the Garden and look back over the Life that 
was the Light of men. If that life had been common- 
place, then this commonplace ending in death might 
seem appropriate, and perhaps we should expect nothing 
more than what men have always experienced. We 
might have dreamed of the same general future for 
Christ that we dream of for ourselves, as the result of 
worthy living ; what the ancients groped after in their 
philosophies ; what the most barbarous and insignificant 
tribes have imagined ; what science and the wisdom of 
the world have reasoned toward, and from the analogies 
of the physical world have judged possible, — another life 
heyoncl the grave ; but a present and visible resurrection 
from the dead for Christ would not have been likely on 
the hypothesis that He was nought but man. But as we 
look back, and glance up and down this Holy Land that 
His feet trod with such wonderful blessing, the case 
becomes very different. The manger-cradle at Bethle- 
hem was different from the little crib in your house. 



THE RISEN LORD. 187 

You say, " This is my baby ; " but Mary treasured in 
her heart angelic words, and could only say, " This Holy 
Thing ! " She could only remember the fatherhood of 
the Holy Ghost. The one scene of Christ's boyhood, 
where He went about His Father's business in the 
Temple and astonished the Eabbis with His wisdom, 
shows the difference between Him and your boy. And 
yet that boyhood, in its general trend and its blessed, 
homelike subjection to parental power, shows a true 
likeness to your boy ; it was your boy, plus. And when 
Cana opens its significant ministry; when the joys of 
men begin to grow deep and pure under the hand of 
Jesus ; when life takes on new forms of health and 
beauty, and evil in human souls acknowledges its con- 
queror in the glance of His eye ; when in home and 
family, in society, in the church of His day, in the doing 
of miracles, in times of temptation, in the direst suffer- 
ing, and last of all in death, we find Him ever the same, 
evident Son of God as well as Son of Man, — then this 
sealed tomb in the Garden becomes to us a miserable 
contradiction, a palpable impertinence, an interference 
altogether unworthy and wholly incredible, if its seal is to 
remain unbroken and its darkness and silence be undis- 
turbed. I am human, subject solely to human condi- 
tions, born as all men are born, and to die as all men die, 
with at least no apparent and immediate resurrection 
from the grave. But the very law of consistency that 
demands this end of life on earth for me demands quite 
another for Jesus. His birth was different from mine; 
it is not unreasonable to expect that His exit from this 
life shall be equally strange. The God-Man, the Holy 



188 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

Thing, whose sole mission has been to reveal the life of 
God, born for this purpose as no other man was ever born, 
shall certainly not die as any other man ever died. 

Moreover, unless Christ's mission as the Eevealer of 
God was to be defective at its highest point, Jesus must 
show that God is greater than death and that right is 
diviner than wrong. Men may say to us : The reputed 
resurrection from the dead of any man is such a marvel- 
lous exception to the rule, that it must be substantiated 
by indisputable evidence, by evidence far greater than 
that demanded in support of any alleged but more com- 
mon fact. "We may answer : You are right ; and we may 
agree that if Jesus died as an ordinary man, there may 
be reason to wish for more, and more consistent, evidence, 
than the !New Testament affords. But we may better 
claim, that, if Jesus Christ has any right to serious 
consideration at all, He was more than man, the condi- 
tions of His Being were different in essential points from 
the conditions of our being, and that therefore an ordinary 
end for His life upon earth would be in need of more 
extraordinary evidential support than is His resurrection 
from the dead. It will be remembered that antecedent 
prooahilities, together with admitted facts which may find 
an adequate explanation in an alleged fact as their cause, 
are more potent evidence for a belief in that fact, than 
that of any eye-witnesses might be. Science, as we have 
seen, is constantly basing its conclusions upon such evi- 
dence. Indeed some very slight induction has often led 
to wild flights of imagination, out of which have come 
important demonstrations of law. Given certain facts, 
we reason that some other facts are likelv, and we search 



THE RISEN LORD. 189 

for them. If they answer to our search, or if they anti- 
cipate it and are seen to be in accord with the observed 
phenomena, they are assigned their place in the law of 
the universe. In the realm of our present discussion 
the same validity of reasoning obtains. Our whole study 
of the life of Jesus has proceeded upon this same scienti- 
fic method. Why should we depart from it with refer- 
ence to the resurrection from the sealed tomb ? It is 
child's play to say that the disciples were deceived ; that 
they stole Him away ; that credulous and hysterical 
women were the first to make the great assertion. It is 
almost equally vain to say, that the testimony of the 
Evangelists is inadequate, and that evidence from eye- 
witnesses should be so complete and of such high char- 
acter that no shred of doubt can be left. It is a case 
that hardly needs witnesses at all, though it has many 
of them. The antecedent probability that such a Being 
as Jesus Christ would break away from death, and the 
subsequent phenomena of Christianity finding adequate 
explanation in the fact of the resurrection, give us all 
the reasonable grounds for faith that we need ; and he 
who disbelieves is the unreasonable and unscientific man. 
Let not him who asks me to believe in a nebular origin 
of the starry skies, or in never-seen molecules in which 
reside the secrets of chemical forces, or in an all-pervad- 
ing ether that accounts for light and heat and electricity, 
ask me to doubt for one moment either God, or the 
resurrection from the dead of the Son of God, whose 
whole pre-existence up to the resurrection morn and 
whose whole influence since that hour are consistent with- 
out fault with that great and glorious fact. His whole 



190 THE REASONABLE CPIRIST. 

life-story, from the annunciation of the angels to Mary 
to the tomb in the garden, and the new moral and spirit- 
ual world that came into being after death had come to 
him and despair to His disciples, conspire to fix our faith 
on some such adequate explanation as His resurrection 
from the grave. 

And now we face the fact that Jesus appeared after 
His resurrection to His disciples only. Why should 
He not ? To them He had spoken words, given direct 
promises, that such an appearance would explain. So 
often had He prophesied this event, that we wonder at 
their despair at His death, not at their ready belief in 
His rising from the dead. And He had taught them 
this not only verbally ; He had shown them His power 
to change the body of flesh into a body whose fabric was 
more ethereal and glorious than their own. They had 
seen Him transfigured with the kindred forms of Moses 
and Elias, long-time inhabitants of the spirit-world. 
They had looked upon Him with awe, when He had 
come to them walking upon the sea, and had said : " It 
is a ghost." But they had learned that it was not a 
mere ghost to mock them with a phantom offer of help, 
but their real Master and Friend, coming to them in a 
body lighter than flesh and disdaining the gulfs that 
would have swallowed the disciples down. They had 
been taught in this school until they had now long 
passed the time for believing in ghosts, and had come to 
the time when they could believe in a body substantial 
indeed, yet superior to the conditions of mere matter, and 
quite independent of mortality. No other men had had 
this training ; and for Christ to have appeared to His foes, 



THE RISEN LORD. 191 

dull, unbelieving, untaught, would have been a breach of 
all the laws of mind and of spiritual affinities. Was 
the training of the disciples to go for nothing? Was 
their companionship with Jesus to be of no avail in 
opening to them a knowledge of the new world, to which 
they were to lead on their fellows to wonderful discover- 
ies of spiritual things, — things which could only be 
" spiritually discerned " ? As well might Columbus have 
gained nothing from all his observation and study to 
make him the natural leader of the more dull and yet 
adventurous men, who were to be the first to tread the 
soil of this western continent. Fruits had fallen from 
the trees in the sight of men for ages before the prepared 
and sympathetic mind of Newton deduced from the same 
common occurrence the law of gravitation. Knowledge 
is very rarely thrown away. The laws of mind are as 
imperative as those of matter. It would be unreasonable, 
if Jesus should show to scoffing Scribe and hardened 
Pharisee the same clear and tender testimony of His 
resurrection-life that He would delight to show to the 
disciple whom He loved, or to that Peter whom He had 
destined to be the Eock on which His church should be 
built. These men were the Columbus, the Newton of 
new realms of thought, prepared to discover new worlds. 
Was it not enough for those foolish men, who had put 
impotent seals upon the door of His tomb, that they 
should know their efforts to have been vain, defeated, — 
their seals broken, their soldiers confounded, His body 
gone ? But for the disciples more than this must be 
given. They must see Him. To one of them He might 
say, " Touch me not ; " to another, " Thrust your hand 



192 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

into my side," as each of these disciples might need the 
lesson ; but to all alike He would give the sight of His 
risen form. The Master whom they had known, would 
not withhold Himself from them, when He had come 
back from "the shadow of death." 

This was reasonable. Faith always has her visions 
that the world knows not of; and the destinies of the 
world have ever been swayed by the men who have 
had visions in which God has revealed to them their 
appointed way. To these first men of faith in Christ, 
therefore, who were to go onward as the pioneers of the 
world's advance in faith and morals, and not to others 
who had " no eyes to see and no ears to hear," was the 
glory of the risen Lord revealed. But we can see more 
than this. Further, it was to these men, and such as 
these, that the future life, of which the resurrection of 
Jesus was at once the revelation and the promise, was 
to be given. Whatever future is taught or to be imagined 
for the wicked, it must be, in the very nature of things, 
a different life from that into which Jesus came forth 
from the grave. If Jesus in His resurrection showed 
that God ever liveth, that divine right conquers wrong, 
that a spiritual life of power and of joy is the heritage 
of such as He, then He showed also that the wicked, 
the impenitent, unspiritual, and selfish, have an " outer 
darkness" for their portion. For the children of light 
the resurrection meant renewed fellowship with Christ 
and God ; for the children of darkness it meant at 
least the lack of that fellowship. Why then should the 
risen Lord reveal Himself to any but His own ? The 
very lack of such an appearance to others was an elo- 



THE RISEN LORD. 193 

quent testimony to their self-imposed doom of separation 
from God. During all the days of His flesh He had been 
seeking sinners in the realm of their own visual and 
tactual world, and even thus had been rejected of them ; 
now when He had passed the bound of that world, and 
had begun to withdraw forever in order that the " Other 
Comforter," the Spirit, might come, it would have been 
inconsistent for Him to have gone back and shown Him- 
self to His foes. Not only does faith have its privileges 
and its rights ; unbelief also has its necessary conditions 
of loss and woe. If the day of Resurrection was to the 
disciples a day of such glory that they observed it as a 
special festival ever afterward, it was to the common 
Scribe and Pharisee, and to the mob that had chosen 
Barabbas to be released unto them, nothing but a com- 
mon day, in which they saw nothing divine. Of course 
it must be so : they had chosen Barabbas ; they had 
killed the Christ. If at their choice the prison had 
opened its door to give them the wicked for their fellow- 
ship, it was right that when the tomb opened its door 
the glorious Lord, the ever-righteous Victor, should seek 
only the company of the righteous, who loved Him, andi 
had chosen Him, and would now receive Him to their 
hearts forever. 

But if Jesus had thus proved to His own people that 
their " faith was not vain," and that God had brought to 
nought the malice of His foes ; if He had shown them 
on this resurrection morning a new light of hope and a 
new surety for His words to them, — "If I live, ye shall 
live also," — He had yet to teach them something about 
their future life and work in this world ; and the resur- 

13 



194 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

rection of Jesus misses its full significance for us if we 
do not note that He had yet commands to give that He 
could not well have given before this supreme testimony 
of the Father's glory in Him had been shown. The new 
life of the world beyond the grave was not the only 
new life assured by Christ's resurrection to His disciples. 
They were to receive " power " for this life. He referred 
to this, and not to their eternal felicity in Heaven, when 
he said in the discourse written in the fourteenth chapter 
of John's gospel : " I will not leave you comfortless ; I will 
come unto you. Yet a little while and the world seeth 
Me no more ; but ye see Me : because I live ye shall live 
also. At that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, 
and ye in Me, and I in you. He who hath My command- 
ments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me ; and 
he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I 
will love him and will manifest Myself to him." No 
doubt he was speaking here of the time when the Spirit 
would be in the Church, while He Himself would be gone 
forever from bodily sight into the heavens. But the new 
life for His disciples, of which He was speaking, was on 
earth, " keeping the commandments " and being conscious 
of the divine Presence. For this life a preparation was 
necessary ; for this life a faith was to be created that 
would have been impossible had He not been seen again 
after the door of the tomb had shut Him in. For this 
life He had yet words to speak of encouragement and 
command, which would prepare the disciples to under- 
stand the inspiration to be given them in the future. 

The Twelve had obeyed His word and forsaken all 
when He said, " Follow Me." Now His hand, and no 



THE RISEN LORD. 195 

other, was to set them in the path of duty which they 
were to tread without His visible presence. His lips, 
and no strange impulse, although heaven-born, were to 
say, " Go ye into all the world and disciple the nations," — 
which would have been almost a cruel command if He 
had not also said, with the proof of the resurrection 
behind the words : " Lo, all power in heaven and in 
earth is given unto Me." The repeated appearances to 
the disciples; the tender encouragement to their faith; 
such words of instruction as He spoke to Peter by the 
lake-shore, showing that patient shepherd-work was 
better than impulsive jumping overboard to worship 
Him ; the loving hint about John's wonderful but weary 
future ; the walk with the two to Emmaus ; the repeated 
"speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of 
God ; " this command first " to wait " and then " to go," 
clothed with the authority of His omnipotence, — all 
these were like the mutation of that dull stairway by 
which they reached the upper room of the Spirit's out- 
pouring into a stairway of glory for their soul's approach 
to the coming spiritual kingdom. Then only, after He had 
taught them thus through forty days and had been lifted 
up irrevocably beyond even the Transfiguration glory by 
the Ascension, could they come together and " tarry " in 
Jerusalem, and be "endued with power from on high." 
Then only could the new life in the Spirit really begin 
for them, for it was only then that their spiritual educa- 
tion was complete. Jesus had not ceased to be merciful 
when the tomb closed upon Him. He would not ask His 
poor disciples with bruised faith to leap at once from the 
joy of His bodily Presence into the new and untried life 



196 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

of the Invisible Spirit. There was a half-way stage for 
tliern. They could have Him yet, but all the time see 
that He could not stay ; was indeed already half gone ; 
His body now flesh and blood, now more like a veil, 
almost a spirit ; and His familiar voice speaking of the 
unfamiliar spiritual companionship soon to come. 

And what a life it turned out to be into which the 
resurrection of Jesus inducted them ! What a life it is 
that " all who have believed on Jesus through their word " 
can live to-day, as the result of Christ's triumph over 
the grave. " Because I live ye shall live also." The 
resurrection-life even in this world is the only life 
w T orthy of the name. It exalted the Apostles at once 
from the obscure fishing-boat to the first place as the 
world's teachers. Before the resurrection they had 
found nothing better than to go back to their nets; 
after the resurrection they were counted worthy to suffer 
as their Master had suffered, to be reviled and imprisoned 
and slain ; and it is only great men that can be important 
enough thus to surfer for righteousness sake. The busy, 
self-seeking world cannot stop to pay attention to weak 
souls having only some little idea to propound. The 
martyrs are those whose lives are so great, whose faith 
and hope are so compelling, that the world must stop 
and listen, and either be convinced or crush out the 
offender of whom the world is not worthy. Eesurrec- 
tion-lives are the pure, sweet, self-sacrificing, hopeful 
lives that can show men how to live indeed. From such 
lives sin flees away and sorrow gathers smiles. From 
such lives pours forth the "living water," that is like 
that river that is from the throne of God. Even in this 
world life is thus ennobled. 



THE RISEN LORD. 197 

But the resurrection gives reasonable faith for more 
than this. " Whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall 
never die," were words singularly consonant with that 
other promise : " I will come again and receive you unto 
Myself, that where I am ye may be also." This word, 
too, must be kept if Jesus was not wholly false. If the 
cradle at Bethlehem was true ; if the life in Palestine 
was what it claimed to be ; if in Him was no sin ; if He 
was obedient even to the death of the Cross, — then His 
rising from the grave confirmed this word : " Where I am 
ye shall be also." No need more for Philip to ask, " Show 
us the way " ! The only answer is in Jesus Himself : " I 
am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." He who goes 
with Jesus in the life that now is, even though his faith 
and faithful service may lead him to some Calvary, shall 
surely go with Jesus past all the power of death, and be 
received up out of all bodily sight with Him. So shall 
he be ever with the Lord. It is a plain way indeed : 
Christ is the essence and sum of it all ; resurrection 
and ascension are with Him ; and as He led His disciples 
out from Jerusalem at last, over the old, familiar path 
on Olivet, past Gethsemane as far as to Bethany, so will 
He lead His Own past every scene of trial until they 
shall be received up, as He was, out of sight of earth. 



XIV. 

CHEIST IN HIS CHURCH. 

TT THEN Jesus first called His disciples He said to 
* * those who had been fishermen, " Follow Me, and 
I will make you fishers of men." His last words con- 
firmed this call, and emphasized all that He had showed 
them concerning the purpose He had in them. They 
were to be a church ; but they were to be banded together, 
not that they might profit by the world, — they were to 
serve the world. " All power is given unto Me in heaven 
and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, 
baptizing them into the name of the Father, and the Son, 
and the Holy Ghost." By teaching ; by declaring Him ; 
by giving the reasons for faith and so producing faith in 
Him ; by doing as He had done in reaching men's affec- 
tions and judgments, — they were to win men and conse- 
crate them by the same act of baptism by which He 
had sought at the beginning of His ministry " to fulfil all 
righteousness." Men were thus to be brought into con- 
tact with Him in the future. No longer could the 
diseased come to Him in throngs and touch the hem of 
His garment to be healed. The bodily service was over. 
But now mind upon mind, spirit upon spirit, would touch, 
and the healing of the soul would be effected, and men 



CHRIST IN HIS CHURCH. 199 

would enter spiritually into the family of God, " into the 
name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." 

The work of the Apostles, therefore, was to be one of 
teaching. For a time, lest the contrast should be too 
sharp and the loss of the body's beneficent presence too 
great ; lest, too, the transition from physical to spiritual 
evidences alone should be too abrupt, — the power of heal- 
ing bodily diseases still remained with the Apostles. 
But they did not depend on this even for the physical 
need of those about them, but at once instituted holy 
almsgiving, and provided by the most natural methods of 
ministration for the welfare of the sick and poor. Hence- 
forth the appeal to miracle would grow less and less fre- 
quent; the appeal to teaching, with its illustration in 
the beauty and beneficence of the common human life, 
would grow more and more invariable. The transfer from 
the body to the soul, from the physical to the spiritual, 
as the prime sphere of Christianity, was necessary and 
to be expected. The mind rules the body and its for- 
tunes ; matter is but the tool of soul. Christ had showed 
this by His own miracles ; He had showed it yet more 
by His insistence upon the spiritual health, which 
should go and sin no more lest a worse evil come than 
bodily disease. To teach, therefore, was now the prime 
duty. To minister to the body still remained, but only 
as the natural and beautiful service of a soul that 
should imitate Jesus, a life that should be governed 
" by the same mind that was in Him " when He made 
Himself of no reputation and suffered in the service of 
mankind. 

Accordingly the Church of Christ came into existence, 



200 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

to live as He had lived with this one purpose in view, 
namely : To show God's nature, God's mind, in human 
life ; to reveal Him by life and teaching ; to help and 
beautify and save life by bringing to men everywhere 
the great truths that would bring about their moral well- 
being, and make their bodily life what it should be. The 
Church was to be a secondary incarnation of God, as 
Jesus had prayed it might be : "I in them and Thou in 
Me ; " " As Thou hast sent Me into the world, even so 
have I also sent them into the world ; " " Neither pray 
I for these alone, but for them also who shall believe on 
Me through their word, that they all may be one, as Thou, 
Father, art in Me and I in Thee, that they also may be 
one in us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent 
Me." A spiritual union with God and Christ was to be 
the new life of men, and the words and works proceeding 
from this new life were to be for the healing of the nations. 
Was it strange then, that some marked phenomenon 
like that observed on the Day of Pentecost, as recorded 
in the Book of the Acts, should indicate the beginning 
of the new era, the birth of this Church on earth ? As 
the Holy Ghost had descended upon Mary, the virgin of 
Nazareth, and Jesus had been thus the Son of God and 
the Son of Man, so now the Holy Ghost descended upon 
the Apostles, mingling no longer Spirit with body but 
Spirit with spirit, to introduce into the world the new 
spiritual life. It was appropriate that such a manifes- 
tation should be given. As its result there was no 
change in the flesh, and no new bodily lives were origi- 
nated ; but new spirits were created, old souls were regen- 
erated, and thousands of new men, believers, disciples, 



CHRIST IN HIS CHURCH. 201 

Sons of God, were bom that day. The Church was born 
into the world, and the perpetuation of the Life of God 
among men was assured. The Apostles had " waited in 
Jerusalem " to be endued with power from on high. Now 
they could "go into all the world and preach." Every- 
where men would believe on their word. It would be 
caught up and repeated in every tongue. Tribe after 
tribe would learn the good news, and become in turn 
the living exponents of God. The new worship, the pure 
and beautiful lives, the mute but constant protest against 
all the old heathen ideas and practices, and the positive 
declaration of the Christ and the " great mystery of god- 
liness " revealed in Him, could not fail to win men from 
fruitless idolatry, in which the hopes of the world had 
been lost. What Christ had showed to the Apostles, 
they showed to all men, — that God was not far from 
any of them, but waiting to be called upon, willing to for- 
give sin freely, and present in their time of need. 

Moreover the Church of Jesus was to be of universal 
extent. It was to be Catholic. "All nations" were to 
be benefited by the Gospel. Neither Jew nor Gentile 
was to stand in a preferred place before God. As Jesus 
had been the Son of Man, the Church was to come to all 
the sons of men, and the Kingdom could not be complete 
until every tribe had heard the message of life. The 
Church could not cease its endeavor, until the last com- 
mand of the Master had been kept, and the farthest 
heathen upon the globe had learned the name of the 
Saviour and been inspired by His love to turn to Him. 

But if this new Society was to be of universal extent, the 
conditions of entrance into it and of membership must 



202 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

be only such as could be complied with by all people. 
Simple, significant, without local peculiarity, suffi- 
cient, the rites and ceremonies, if any, must be adapted 
to all climes and tribes, to all ages and to each sex. 
When men have sought to form societies for any purpose 
whatever, they have generally thought it necessary to 
draw up a strictly formulated constitution, and to insti- 
tute rites of initiation, and to levy taxes or assessments 
to meet the needs of the case. In many instances impos- 
ing rituals have been assumed, and the strictest bonds of 
secrecy have been laid upon members to aid by means of 
mystery the feelings of obligation to the body. It was 
not so with Christ in His Church. He demanded one 
condition of spiritual nature : a turning to God and 
the acceptance of Himself as Prophet, Priest, and King. 
He must declare God; He must mediate between God 
and man ; He must rule in man's life. This condition 
can be complied with in every clime, and the soul can 
find its best estate only by conformity to this law. 
Beyond this, baptism was commanded as the outward 
symbol of the inward change. Any one who would, 
could be baptized as Jesus was. The requirement was 
perhaps the simplest as well as the most significant rite 
that could be chosen. And it was the most sacred from 
its place in the consecration of Christ Himself. Then 
the breaking of bread and the drinking of wine together 
in serious and worshipful way, as He gave them the 
example before the crucifixion, would be a sign, con- 
stantly repeated, of their life in Christ. " This do," He 
said, "as often as ye do it, in remembrance of Me." 
That was all. With undefined frequency, with perfect 



CHRIST IN HIS CHURCH. 203 

freedom from any additional conventionalism, the Church 
is to do these simple deeds, as He said. No others would 
be appropriate in a catholic church. 

The religious books of the first Christians were those 
that they inherited from Judaism. These books were 
the product of the needs of the old time. They had 
grown into a magnificent body of literature, endeared to 
the nation, believed to be the word of God, and found 
adequate to meet such a claim by their lofty religious 
import and their power upon human life. That these 
books had testified of a Messiah could not be doubted ; 
that that Messiah had come, was now the belief of the 
Christian Church. While, therefore, the books of the 
Old Covenant were still fondly cherished and devoutly 
consulted, the fulfilment of their predictions and culmi- 
nation of their hopes in Jesus were naturally the theme 
of constant discourse, as the Apostles, and all who knew 
the facts, preached the new faith to the world. Nor was 
it only in the line of new facts that the common Chris- 
tian speech naturally made additions to the stock of 
knowledge inherited from the Old Testament. A 
development of doctrine naturally arose. Preachers to 
their congregations, parents to their children, friends to 
friends, would undertake to show how truth long hid in 
seed was now growing up into the light and ripening to 
glad harvests. New heavens of thought as well as a 
new earth of experience were unfolding. And thus from 
year to year a very considerable body of tradition came 
into existence, naturally developed under the leadership 
and inspiration of the Holy Ghost, in whom, as we have 
seen, the infant Church had all its being. It was only 



204 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

a repetition of the phenomena of the Jewish Church 
itself, by which its traditions, holy and emanating from 
the word of God Himself, were through a long time 
coming to that volume, which was finally perpetuated 
in writing by the holy men of old, and given from time 
to time to be the priceless treasure of the people. 

It was thus that the New Testament came into being 
as the Sacred Scriptures of the new Church. As the 
books of the Old Testament had been the product of 
religious life under the Mosaic order, so the various 
Christian books were written naturally, the product of 
Christian life and needs, every book bearing the stamp 
of personality, locality, and circumstance, and showing 
the way in which the divine spirit of Christ would meet 
the want. And yet the nature of the documents proves 
beyond cavil that their contents were to be useful in all 
times and places and in all circumstances, in which 
similar conditions and wants should appear. If the first 
letters to the churches, addressed especially to the Thes- 
salonians, were for the purpose of allaying doubts, and 
calming strifes, and teaching about the relations of the 
dead and the living at the crisis of the world, which was 
generally believed to be near, — then the same letters, 
because they meet the issue and teach what is also of 
universal interest and value, will be of the first impor- 
tance to all Christians in all time. If the Gospel of 
Matthew gave to men a written statement of what the 
writer had seen and known of the Life of Jesus, and if 
the Gospels of Mark and Luke brought into definite and 
permanent shape the current traditions, or the remem- 
brances of apostles, of the same marvellous life, these 



CHRIST IN HIS CHURCH. 205 

gospels were the natural and reasonable outgrowth of 
the life and needs of the Church in the time in which 
they were written, as they are also the historic sources 
of knowledge for all the generations since that day. As 
the life of the Church was a growth, so the literature of 
the Church was a growth ; and it was not until the middle 
of the fourth century, that it became generally evident 
that the need of the Church was wholly met in this 
respect. During two hundred and fifty years no book 
had been produced that was deemed worthy to stand 
with those of the New Testament as we now have it, 
and the canon was considered complete. The books 
adjudged canonical were all believed to have emanated 
from Apostolic sources, and to have been the product 
of the first century of the Christian era. 

But if this was the natural evolution of the Christian 
Scriptures, what shall be said of their inspiration ? Can 
a reasonable belief in their inspiration be compatible 
with such a growth? We are not concerned to define 
the nature of inspiration or to defend any theory that 
has been advanced, since these pages are not at all for the 
proof of dogma, but only to inquire into the reasonable- 
ness of the alleged facts of Christ's life and works. But 
indirectly the question receives legitimate answer. Is 
God's direct influence shut out from all that is natural ? 
We have seen that Christian life itself, however depen- 
dent upon secondary causes for its inception and growth, 
can be referred only in the last issue to the Spirit of God 
in fellowship with the human soul. The Church, not 
before known as a factor in human affairs, came into 
being at the touch of the Holy Ghost, yet through the 



206 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

very natural means of human preaching and the conta- 
gious enthusiasm of the first disciples. Now if these same 
followers of Christ, led by His spirit in the formation 
of the Church, found the need arising to write tender 
exhortations, or doctrinal treatises, or biographies of 
Jesus, or a history of the actions of the Apostles in the 
first few years ; if they did so write, and produced books 
the like of which the world has never seen for the ex- 
pression of truth, for religious fervor, for instruction in 
morals, and for inspiring a lofty hope ; if these writers, 
with but two exceptions, claimed no literary training and 
are known to have been plain men ; if in addition to all 
these circumstances they claimed divine help, and that 
a promise made to them by Jesus before He died had 
been fulfilled, to the effect that they should be led into 
all truth by the Holy Ghost, — then the presumption is 
reasonable, even if the conclusion is not irresistible, that 
the claim is true, and that they wrote as they were 
inspired. Just as the life of Jesus is consistent with the 
origin claimed for it, so the nature of the New Testament 
is wholly consistent with the doctrine of inspiration. It 
is quite reasonable to believe that under such circum- 
stances, for such a purpose, and with such results, the Holy 
Spirit gave His aid to these holy men to produce a litera- 
ture, that should henceforth rank the highest among all 
the literature of the world ; thus laying hold of the most 
powerful and permanent means known to mankind, the 
expression of thought in the written page, to accomplish 
the moral and religious instruction of the race. 

The New Testament was thus most reasonably pro- 
duced. It came not without the mind of God; but it 



CHRIST IN HIS CHURCH. 207 

came through man, the outgrowth of the need of the 
times, the product of life rather than the miraculous 
origin of life. The Saviour Himself had marked this 
natural progress when He called Himself " The Way, 
the Truth, and the Life." The way is shown by the 
truth; but there is something better and greater even 
than truth ; it is that for which truth exists, — life. So 
the Christian life was not meant to be the product of 
books ; but books, the truth recorded by the inspired 
Christian life, were to serve the life from which they 
sprung. Life knowing the truth, having applied it to 
life's need and found it adequate, shaped the tool into 
best and permanent form for the carving of its own 
destiny and the destiny of the world. That these Holy 
Writings were thus the product of life, instead of being 
a completed volume flung down from flaming skies, from 
which life itself should be born and fostered, is at least 
as compatible with any reasonable theory of inspiration as 
if they had been given complete and by one act, as Moses 
received the commandments on Mount Sinai. And that 
such an origin for these books of the New Testament is 
most natural is plain, and thus they are received by the 
Church as the authority for its faith and practice. And 
if, as in the case of the Eoman Church, a body of tradi- 
tion extraneous to Scripture is admitted as authoritative, 
even this body of tradition can but appeal to the same 
origin as that of the Scriptures themselves, with the 
preponderance of simplicity and safety forever on the 
side of the written word, since the sources of this 
written word were limited to the apostolic times. 
The Protestant appeal to the New Testament, there- 



203 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

fore, may be admitted to be reasonable and right. Life 
may now be shaped by its teachings, although it first 
was the product of life itself, as redeemed and taught of 
God. We do not appeal to the Bible because it originates 
any truth for us • we appeal to it because it contains the 
truth, — truth already proved in human experience, revela- 
tions to men and in men of God and of Jesus Christ His 
Son. These revelations were facts ; upon these facts 
Christian lives were built; and from these Christian lives, 
from them and for them, were produced by the promptings 
of the Holy Ghost the Scriptures of the faith. 

The Scriptures of the New Testament are therefore safe 
historic documents for the determination of the kind of 
life that Christ created in His Church: they set before 
the world an ideal, but they also show the practical 
results upon life by the acceptance of that ideal. The 
little Christian community does not appear perfect all at 
once ; it exhibits an immeasurable advance not only upon 
the surrounding heathenism, but also upon the Jewish 
life of the day. There was no violent break with Judaism 
at first; but that break surely came as time went on, 
and the questions of circumcision and the observance of 
ceremonial in general became important with the disper- 
sion of the Christians and the reception and mingling 
of Jewish and Gentile converts in one body. But these 
questions were from the first secondary to the life. The 
earliest demonstration of difference between the Church 
and all the rest of the world appeared in its abounding 
love. Self was no longer the centre of life. God and 
fellow-man came into the place of self. It is a common 
mistake to suppose that this spirit showed itself in a 



CHRIST IN HIS CHURCH. 209 

communism either enforced or voluntary on the part of 
the first Christians. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles 
draws no such picture. "As every man had need" in 
the Church he found that need met by loving gift, even 
at the expense on the part of the richer of selling land 
or house. But no man was compelled to sell his posses- 
sions for the sake of a common purse, and the case of 
Ananias distinctly shows that every man was free to do 
what he would with his own. Even if he sold his lands 
the money was still his, and he could give it in part or 
whole, or retain all at his own will. It was just such 
communism as may be observed to-day under the better 
circumstances of life in almost any church. Poverty is 
amply relieved, distress is quickly and lovingly averted 
by prompt service and glad self-sacrifice; and that in- 
stance is rare indeed in which known suffering goes an 
hour without pity and actual relief. Doubtless the 
Apostolic Church in Jerusalem at first carried this prac- 
tice of relief farther than any other church has ever 
done, and attendant evils arose. It was natural for the 
first impulse to send the pendulum of the new love to an 
extreme ; but it were rash to assume that such was meant 
to be the normal motion of that Christian love forever. 
In fact the regulating force of the life of the Church 
soon came to its even poise, and from that hour to this 
it has never ceased to govern that life after the reasonable 
example of the Lord Himself. 

But although the poverty of later phases of Christian 
life and the communism sought by some for the world's 
weal were not to be found in the early Church, it 
is plain that therein appeared that new grace of .charity, 

H 



210 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

of love to all men, but especially to those of the 
household of faith, which was to be the special mark 
of Christianity. This love and mutual helpfulness was 
chiefly confined at first to the Church itself, and naturally, 
since no large thought is of instantaneous growth, and 
also because the sympathies of the first Christians were 
chiefly shut in upon themselves by the persecution to 
which the new faith was subject. Jesus had taught 
such large truth upon this subject as that embodied in 
the second great commandment of the Christian law, 
and in the parable of the Good Samaritan ; and His 
word was destined surely to be fulfilled in the life of 
His people. The earliest conception of Christian duty, 
however, was satisfied with ministering to the needs of 
the Christians themselves ; and at many later periods the 
Church wrapped itself in selfishness, and by just so much 
lapsed from Christ ; but from a very early time, and always 
with increasing force, from age to age the love of the Church 
has laid hold upon all mankind, and the larger concep- 
tion of Christian duty has prevailed. Nothing human 
is alien to the loving sympathy of the Church, and the 
ideal is constantly approached in which " the same mind 
that was in Christ " shall appear perfectly in His dis- 
ciples. While it was never meant that the Church 
should arrogate to itself the prerogatives of government, 
or look to any human power for patronage, it was the 
divine purpose to send forth its influence in every direc- 
tion, to leaven all the affairs of men, to teach and con- 
trol by moral forces, and to mould human society in 
accordance with the truth taught by Jesus. In His 
conception religion was never a thing of mere form; 



CHRIST IN HIS CHURCH. 211 

it was never to be divorced from ethics ; it was to be 
a thing of life. 

The Church, moreover, was to be one. But as we have 
already seen there was little thought of formal unity. 
A church for which no government was dictated ; whose 
ordinances were reduced to the least number and greatest 
simplicity ; and whose thought was presented even in its 
own earliest Scriptures with the greatest variety, could 
hardly be held to a unity of outward body. The greatest 
dogmatic writer of the New Testament declared faith 
and hope and charity to be of abiding force ; but where 
faith might wander and hope waver, love was declared 
greatest of all. Why has not the unity of the Church 
been sought always in this love rather than in creedal 
statements ? Creeds have been and are of vast usefulness 
in the service of exact thinking; but so long as men 
exist and think it will be impossible for perfect Christian 
unity to find its statement in a creed. But charity is 
possible to all. Love abides. God is love. This is a 
statement of primal truth. To love Him and to love 
man are the two great commandments of the Christian 
law, and on these two hang all law and the prophets. 
Prophecy is hope ; law is formulated belief; but greater 
than these is charity. If Saint Paul could say this, it 
would seem that no other Christian would care to place 
unity of creed in the first place, or fail to see that there 
can be no hope for the world apart from the primacy of 
love. 

Statements of belief, confessions of faith, find their 
reasonable place, therefore, only as watchwords of life, 
rallying cries of brotherhood, standards for the practical 



212 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

grouping of the great Christian hosts for the most effi- 
cient work. A trellis is not a bad thing for a vine unless 
some one conceives the idea that the vine gets its life 
from the trellis, and cuts off the branches from the stock 
to graft them into the painted wood of the frame. Faith 
helps growth ; confessions should not hinder it. Christ 
was reasonable ; He blessed Peter's impulsive declaration 
of belief in Him ; He taught a faith so clear that it never 
could be confounded with any other ; but He showed life 
and love to be greater than words, and exalted the 
spirit above any slavery to the letter. 

A personal and loving devotion to Christ is the one 
bond of the Church ; a spirit of love to each other must 
unite all in Him. A church committed forever to one 
phase of doctrine, to one system of thought, which a 
certain age or leader has formulated, must be a church 
without progress, unfitted to cope with the needs of all 
the ages as they come. But a church open to the con- 
tinual leadership of the Holy Spirit, with brain alert 
though consecrated, and hand ready for every good work 
because unfettered, will be the best exponent of the 
Christ, since it is committed to growth in knowledge, 
and to the unity of love toward God and man. 

It follows almost of necessity that the Church must 
live in the common life of the world, not exalting itself 
beyond the easy approach of men, nor withdrawing into 
a holy seclusion, from which it shall sally forth upon 
errands of beneficence as need may call and love impel. 
As Christ was in the world His Church is to be in the 
world, sharing its common secular life, touching all men 
at all points of human experience. No classes are to be 



CHRIST IN HIS CHURCH. 213 

omitted, no customs are to be ignored. At a very early 
date saints were found in Caesar's household at Eome. 
It was natural that such a religion should dominate at 
last the throne itself, and drive out the paganism of the 
empire. But it was also natural, that during all that 
early time "not many mighty" should be called, but 
that peasants, slaves, common people, should receive most 
gladly the faith of the Christ, who had lived their life in 
humility and suffering. In this day we see the same 
thing, and the effort of the Church is properly the effort 
of Jesus. The common people follow Christ in the 
largest numbers ; but the rich and great are not excluded. 
Christ is for the beggar by the wayside ; for the prosper- 
ous business-man ; for the delicate and the rich ; for the 
monarch. And in coming to all of these, the follower 
oi Christ is to pursue the reasonable course that he finds 
in the example of Jesus. He is not to demand that all 
distinctions shall be leveled or the customs of society 
fashioned to his own needs, before he can seek the com- 
panionship of the lofty or the lowly. A bigoted, condemn- 
ing, narrow spirit is not to shut the Christian away from 
the world's feasting, but when he shares in such pleasures 
the spirit of Jesus must go in his bosom. Jesus was 
always courteous. We remember that he defended the 
woman who was kneeling at His feet, by contrasting her 
loving service with the lack of the ordinary courtesies of 
Oriental hospitality with which His host had received 
Him. 1 At no wedding, at no feast, did He mar the 
enjoyment of the occasion by a diatribe against natural 
mirthfulness. On the contrary His first miracle, which 

1 Luke vii. 44. 



21-4 THE REASONABLE CHRIST. 

perhaps He meant to be typical of the whole course of 
His ministry, was done for the purpose of saving embar- 
rassment and adding to the joys of a festal hour. It is 
not the part of the Church of Christ to withdraw from 
ordinary social pleasures any more than to withhold 
itself from a neighbor's poverty or grief, or to turn un- 
heeding away from the perils that may be threatening 
society. 

The Church can reach the world by no moroseness, by 
no asceticism, by no artificial lines of a mock and shallow 
righteousness, by no repellent eccentricities of speech, or 
dress, or custom. If Jesus taught anything by His life, 
it was that the life of God is to be domesticated in 
human life. God's kingdom is to come by our doing as 
Jesus did. By living in the midst of men, by having no 
assumed but a real and hearty sympathy with its joys, 
by helping its sorrows and aiding it to solve its great 
problems that from age to age call for the best and holi- 
est thought, by trying to deliver it from its crime and 
its degradation as well as from its enthralment to folly, — 
by such exalted life the Christian shall best follow Christ. 
So doing, the Church may preserve a calm confidence in 
itself and its mission. However it pipes to the merry or 
mourns with the lamenting, the world will find fault 
with it, as the children in the marketplace of Christ's 
parable l did with their fellows. But if it is wise, its 
wisdom will surely be justified at last. It must be 
patient ; it must be calm ; it must be courageous. The 
Church is bound to be conservative, since it is a 
teacher, and dares not forsake what it has believed to be 

i Luke vii. 32. 



CHRIST IN HIS CHURCH. 215 

the truth until its positions have been proved wrong 
beyond any doubt. But its conservatism is equally bound 
to welcome all light, from whatever quarter, and to re- 
ceive as truth that which has borne the test of every rea- 
sonable investigation. Jesus grew in knowledge as in 
stature ; and the Church of Christ in like manner shall 
'find itself growing in favor with God and man only as it 
grows in knowledge, and advances to fill the whole earth. 
" To have the same mind that was in Christ," to live as He 
lived, is the reasonable part of His Church, as He indi- 
cated by comparing Himself and it to a vine with its 
branches. His Spirit is in His Church, and so His last 
word to His disciples ere His bodily presence was taken 
from them is fulfilled : " Lo, I am with you alway, even 
unto the end of the world." 



THE END. 



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